


Earthbound Misfits

by PhantomEngineer



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Slytherin Lily Evans Potter
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-26
Updated: 2018-05-19
Packaged: 2018-12-20 07:02:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 42,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11915640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PhantomEngineer/pseuds/PhantomEngineer
Summary: After discussing Houses on the train heading to Hogwarts, Lily and Severus hope to be together in Slytherin. However, they find that Slytherin is not always so welcoming of those with muggle backgrounds, and that Slytherin is not particularly popular as a House. Despite this, they have each other and nothing can really change the fact that magic is real.A lot of grotty optimism. A certain amount of grim misery combined with the wonders of magic. This story will be long. Might not play out the way you're expecting, but then it really depends on what you're expecting.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Starts pretty much straight after Lily and Severus leave the carriage containing James and Sirius (as seen in The Prince's Tale of Deathly Hallows)

After finding themselves a new compartment on the Hogwarts Express, just for themselves and without any unwanted company, Lily and Severus sat in bad-tempered silence, gazing out the window as the rolling green hills of England swept past. The silence was disturbed by Severus sniffing occasionally, which irritated Lily. She was in a bad mood, and that was only making it worse. For a day she had been looking forward to with such great excitement for years, it had got off to a bad start. Arguing with Petunia seemed to be something that happened naturally, no matter what she did. Whenever she and Petunia argued, her father would shut himself in his study and read old issues of Wisden and her mother would cry.

Severus, by contrast, was easy to argue with. He never fought back or held grudges, just gave her a hurt look and hunched over, his disreputably long hair falling in his face. She supposed it was unfair of her, to take out her anger at the argument with Petunia on him, but it was hard to resist. After the run-in with the two boys in the previous carriage, though, she was feeling a little uncertain. None of her social interactions had gone well. She had a sudden fear that maybe everyone would be like the two boys and Petunia, that she’d be left with only Severus for a friend. Unless he found someone better, more magical than her.

She looked cautiously over at Severus. He was looking steadfastly out the window, seemingly trying to focus on something. He was sniffing occasionally, and his breath seemed to be shaky. He licked his lips and bit at them, blinking furiously. Suddenly curious, she looked closer. Was it just the light reflecting through the glass, or were his eyes brighter than usual? She almost looked away, embarrassed at having potentially caught him on the verge of tears, but a ripple of courage caught her. Her day had started badly, seemingly consisting of nothing but arguments, but he’d been involved in two of them. She knew his father didn’t like magic, and his mother had always scared Lily even though she’d never admit it to Severus. It was entirely possible he’d had as bad a day as she had. Her heart softened slightly, determined that they would arrive at their destination cheerfully as they had always dreamed.

She wracked her brain, trying to think of something to say. In the end, the best she could come up with was in feeble response to the conversation they (and those other boys) had had about the Houses of Hogwarts, “I hope we’re in the same House,” she said, “How is it decided?”

“I don’t know,” Severus answered quietly, and there was a strange tone in his voice that she’d never heard before when they’d discussed magic and the magical world. It had been one of the topics that Lily could almost guarantee would have him glowing in excitement and wonder, but now he sounded almost ashamed. 

“Did your mum say why she thought you’d be in Slytherin?” Lily asked hopefully, wondering if there may be a clue in that, but Severus shook his head.

“I think she was?” he was his only response as he glumly watched the fields of England pass by.

“Like a family thing?” Lily said in sudden concern. The boys from the other carriage had both mentioned family history in relation to the Houses. Maybe that was how it was decided, she reasoned, “But if it’s family… What about me?”

“Maybe you get to chose?” Severus suggested uncertainly, looking at her briefly. He still looked deeply unhappy, “I hope you can, and that…” he tailed off, looking away sharply.

“I’ll try to be in Slytherin,” Lily said fiercely. She didn’t quite know what the Houses entailed, but she knew she would rather be in the same House as Severus rather than the other one the two boys from the other carriage had mentioned.

He sniffed again, and Lily continued, “I promise. I’ll do my best to be in Slytherin with you. But no matter what, we’ll still be best friends, right?”

He looked at her and she could see now that he really was desperately trying to blink back tears. She felt some prick at the backs of her eyes too as he said earnestly, “I’ll always want to be your friend,” and he might have said more, but to Lily’s annoyance the door to their carriage opened at that very moment and a jolly old lady pushing a trolley poked her head in with a friendly smile.

“Anything from the trolley dearies?” she asked cheerfully, her eyes kind. She wore a pink pastel robe, looking effortlessly welcoming with her immaculately curled grey hair. Severus had turned away, returning his gaze to the scenery outside the window. He gave an almost imperceivable shake of his head as he did so, hunching away from the lady and her trolley. Lily looked from him to the lady, and leapt up before the lady backed away out of the carriage.

“Can I have a look?” she asked, uncertain, scrabbling in her brand new, brown leather satchel for the small pouch of money she’d shoved haphazardly in it. She looked at the wares on offer, carefully considering them as the lady watched her kindly. She glanced at Severus, hopeful for a hint or guidance, but he was ignoring everything in favour of the British countryside. He scratched at his head in irritation, as he often did, but steadfastly refused to consider the trolley. Lily considered the chocolate frogs briefly, as chocolate was rarely a bad choice, but she worried about offending Severus by buying him one and she didn’t want to eat one alone. Besides, she reasoned, chocolate was chocolate regardless of the shape. Some of the other sweets looked more interesting and easier to share. She steered clear of the cockroach clusters and the blood flavoured lollipops, finding them both to be somewhat unappealing to say the least, and ultimately deciding that the most tempting item on offer was the small packages labelled Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans. Jelly beans seemed like a easy option, that could be shared without any hassle. They seemed made to be shared, even. Plus, Lily reasoned, jelly beans were familiar enough that she wasn’t too worried, but the promise of many exciting flavours intrigued her. The lady cheerfully told her the price, took her money and gave her a small box.

The lady left as cheerfully as she’d entered, obviously taking the clear hint that Severus would not be buying anything. Lily carefully opened her small box, and gave the jelly beans a considerate sniff. She could not identify any particular scent but noted that the range of colours was fantastic. She moved to the window, and leaned close to Severus, offering the box to him. He looked at her with a hint of repressed suspicion, regarding the jelly beans with an expression of curiosity he seemed to be trying to hide.

“Try one with me?” Lily asked, and to her relief he nodded. They both picked out a bean each, Severus opting for a strangely beige one and Lily choosing a fascinatingly grey-brown bean. With a shared smile, they popped the jelly beans into their mouths at the same time. Reflected in each other’s face, they could see equal looks of confusion and regret at having eaten the beans.

“I think,” Severus said, as he swallowed reluctantly, “That might have been worm flavour,”

“Mine was dirt…” Lily admitted with a certain hint of disgust colouring her tone. She looked suspiciously at the remaining beans. Slowly, she closed the box up, to consider at a later date. Magical people obviously had strange tastes.

“I’ve got some parma violets,” Severus offered, rummaging in his pockets. He offered her a tube, and she gratefully ate one. The sweet, aromatic flavour was a pleasant replacement for the heady taste of dirt. 

“I wonder if they’re all so horrible,” Lily wondered with a hint of morbid fascination, enjoying her reassuringly normal parma violet.

Severus sucked on his too, before crunching it as he tended to, “I guess the only way to find out is to try some more…?” he reasoned logically, not sounding particularly enthusiastic about testing the remaining beans, “I’ve got a few more tubes of parma violets, at least. I stocked up,” he told her and Lily was overwhelmed with gratitude for something so welcomingly reliably normal. Severus, she had noticed, had a magical knack for acquiring parma violets even though Lily was pretty certain she’d never actually seen him buy any on any of the occasions they’d drifted into one of the various corner shops around Cokeworth. It was a mysterious talent that Lily was only too happy to benefit from. 

As the British countryside passed by, the landscape taking on the drama of the north as they wound their way towards the unknown destination, Lily grumpily wondered why the train had to leave from London. Her parma violet finished, she judged it to be lunch time. She did not bother to check the actual time, as her parents weren’t there to lecture her on the importance of patience, and she was starting to get hungry. She shoved the unwanted box of Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans into her satchel and removed the carefully packed lunch she’d received from her mother. Severus titled his head slightly in consideration at the appearance of her lunch, and she hoped franticly that he had something to eat besides parma violets. He still seemed to be bothered by something, as if something had disturbed him. To her relief, he moved towards his battered satchel, which may once have been either green or black, it was hard to really be sure. From it he withdrew what looked to be sandwiches.

“I got cheese and pickle,” she said cheerfully, “Want to go halves?” as they often shared food. 

He peeled back one of the slices of bread cautiously, before informing her, “Marmite,” and nodding his agreement.

She handed one of her sandwiches over to him, which he carefully placed on the seat. He examined both of his sandwiches, giving them both a cursory sniff, before handing one over to her. She resolutely ate it first, as he turned slightly away from her to eat the sandwich he’d received from her first. The bread was stale and the marmite was overly strong, but Severus had never given her anything that wasn’t safe to eat. She was fairly confident that he had on occasion eaten slightly mouldy bread rather than give it to her, so she would always unflinchingly eat whatever it was he gave her in the knowledge that he always kept the worst for himself. If she refused it, he would reluctantly hand back her much nicer cheese and pickle sandwich and to her that was a far more unbearable option. These sandwiches had clearly been made by his mother. Severus tended to make slightly better sandwiches and meals in general. One of the most delightful aspects of their friendship was the way in which he would constantly be able to find berries or fruit for them to snack on while they were out playing. 

“This is only the second time I’ve been out of Cokeworth,” he told her, watching the landscape outside the window as he started to eat his marmite sandwich. Logically, Lily knew that meant his first time leaving Cokeworth would have to have been the trip he undoubtably took to Diagon Alley. It had been a source of frustration that they had not been allowed to go together, and now hearing this she dearly wished they had.

“When we’re older, let’s go somewhere interesting and far away,” Lily said, in between bites of her infinitely more pleasant sandwich. He nodded. After their sandwiches, Lily opened her pack of crisps, glad to note that they were Seabrook’s salt and vinegar. She gestured to him to show he was welcome to share them, but he hesitated slightly.

“I’ve got nowt more,” he told her, “I meant to pick some sloes or something, but mum gave me a bath in some horrible chemical concoction so I couldn’t,” This surprised Lily, as she knew that bath day for the Snapes was Sunday, before church. Part of the reason she knew was because Severus hated it with a passion. He didn't tend to give too much detail about his home life, but she knew that he hated going to church and hated bathing in the cold water after his parents. He reminded her somewhat of the time her grandmother had washed her cat. The cat, which normally kept itself clean perfectly well, had screamed like a demon and scratched everyone it could reach in its unholy fury. It had hissed and sulked in the corner of the bathroom afterwards, dripping and scraggly. Having been unceremoniously dunked into the tin bath this morning, even if the bath water had been solely for him, had obviously ruffled Severus’s feathers, leaving him angry. His hair looked to still be a bit damp, hanging in lank chunks and looking unpleasantly greasy, which made Lily wonder about the effectiveness of whatever his mother had used to wash him. She could empathise with his obvious irritation. She accepted the necessity of her twice weekly baths, but she resented every time her mother would finely comb through her hair, tutting, and subject her to a horrible smelling shampoo. This was not helped by the fact that Petunia invariably took the chance to make a disparaging comment about Severus, riling up Lily’s temper and and making her mother more annoyed. 

She shrugged with a casual, “It’s fine, have some. You’re my supply of parma violets after all,” which made him smile his slightly crooked, toothy smile.

They crunched away at the crisps in comparable silence, the bad temper of the morning fading. This was a relief to the both of them, as arriving in a new environment without the comforting reminder of their friendship would have made the whole experience more intimidating. Severus still seemed to have something on his mind, but Lily waited as patiently as she could. It might be something to do with his family, in which case there was a chance he wouldn’t tell her anyway, but she knew by now that pressing him wouldn’t make him more likely to tell her.

Once the crisps were finished, Lily considered whether it would be a good move to start reading the _Standard Book of Spells_ she had shoved into her satchel, in preparation for their arrival at Hogwarts, when Severus began to speak slowly and with a degree of reluctance. He seemed to be trying to remember something, almost as if he didn’t really want to think about it.

“Me mum mentioned that some families have traditions,” he said, and it took Lily a moment to realise that he was probably referring to the boys they had encountered earlier, even if it was in a roundabout way. She hadn’t really been paying that much attention to them, and had pretty much put them from her mind once they’d left the carriage, though it was obvious now that they’d struck a nerve with Severus. She waited silently, with a hint of excitement. She knew that Severus’s mother didn’t give out much information about the wizarding world. From what she could tell, Eileen Snape didn’t give out much information or even talk a huge amount, so the small fragments were of especial value. Now they would be able to discover new things for themselves, but for those initial years of their friendship in Cokeworth, their knowledge of this bright new world that awaited them came exclusively from whatever small scraps of detail she chose to impart to her eager son, which he in turn shared with Lily, his whole face glowing with excitement.

“There’s some old families that have been magical since the year dot. Ones that are infamous for dark magic and curses, that everyone’s scared of them. They all know all sorts of nasty curses practically from birth, it’s in their blood. People I - we - should be careful of and not make enemies out of,” he continued, not meeting her eye.

Lily digested this information. Both of the boys she they had encountered did seem to be pretty confident and familiar with the wizarding world. She shivered slightly, “But that’s not fair,” she protested weakly, “I’ve never learnt any magic, I thought that wasn’t supposed to matter…”

“Neither have I,” Severus pointed out sadly, “We might have to study really hard to catch up… And stay safe…” he added and she was grateful that he saw the threats of the world so much more clearly than she did. She couldn’t quite comprehend what kind of nasty spells the children from magical backgrounds might know, but she had a sneaking suspicion that if they wanted to do harm, the two of them would be fairly defenceless. She once again resolved to avoid the house they’d mentioned - was it Gryffindor? - and hope frantically to be with Severus. 

He pulled out of his satchel the book she’d also bought, the one about defending against ‘Dark Forces’, though hers was a brand new copy and his had a slightly different subtitle to hers, in addition to having what looked like bite marks from what Lily vaguely assumed to be either rats or mice. She didn’t think it likely that any of the Snapes had been responsible for the chewing of the book. Together, they poured over the introduction, sitting side by side. Most of the rest of the journey passed with them commenting and talking excitedly about defending themselves from dark magic and evil curses, until Lily realised that they needed to change into their school robes.

Scrabbling, they withdrew their scrunched up robes. Lily’s mother had sighed at her and told her to fold it properly, but Lily had just shoved it into her satchel regardless. The instructions had specified that the trunks would be stored in the baggage section of the carriage, and would be transported from there to their dormitories so the belonging they wanted for the train journey had to be packed separately. Her mother had packed her other clothes into her brand new trunk, complete with runic spells to make it light enough to lift easily, but Lily had been left to her own devices for the satchel. Severus, she was amused to notice, had likewise not folded his robe. Unlike hers, it looked to be second hand. He stood up and drew the curtain over the window in the carriage door, so they could get changed without accidentally gaining an audience.

“So, we take everything off and put the robes on?” Lily checked with him, certain of the answer already. She was already removing her yellow-flowered sundress, almost signifying the end of summer to be replaced with the dark cold of the winter that would follow the encroaching autumn.

He nodded, “I think underwear is alright…?” he reasoned, starting to remove his eclectic clothing. Like all his outfits, it consisted mainly of clothes that were old, didn’t appear to fit him or even have been originally purchased for him.

“What about socks?” Lily asked, looking at her feet poking out from underneath her black school robes.

Severus paused slightly and thoughtfully pulled his robes over his head. He sat down, stuck his feet out and wiggled his toes in consideration. He was wearing charmingly odd socks, a lacy yellow one on his left foot and a well-darned but far too large grey one his right. Lily could not recall ever having seen him in matching socks.

“Do wizards wear socks…?” he wondered aloud, and they shared an amused grin.

“I hope so,” Lily admitted, with a giggle, “Otherwise we’re going to have cold feet in winter,”

Severus shrugged, “No one’s going to know with the robes,” as they looked at each other with repressed excitement. Finally they looked like a real witch and wizard, about to begin their magical education.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Narcissa says some slightly unpleasant things and I almost certainly overuse words like wonderment. But Hogwarts is pretty wonderful if you've grown up in the muggle world, and Narcissa is a Black, who is supposed to have some unsavoury opinions.

Arriving at the train platform made Lily feel small, and she was once again grateful that she and Severus had made up. Most of the other students seemed to know exactly where they were going, and it was all the two of them could do to prevent themselves being swept away in the chaos of the noisy crowd. Even the students that they assumed to be also first years seemed to be comfortable and self-assured, greeting each other and the older students as if there was nothing particularly exciting or intimidating about the day. The sun was starting to set, throwing shadow across the scene and adding an air of mystery. 

A large man stood head and shoulders above the crowd, looming over them like Lily imagined a giant would, his face almost entirely covered by a thick black beard. He was calling for the first years in a booming voice, so the two of them did their best to fight their way across the platform towards him. Lily took Severus’s hand, in an effort not to be separated as it appeared the other years were all heading in a different direction. For a brief moment she thought he might shake her off, but he squeezed her hand gladly. 

The giant of a man was shepherding the first years onto a fleet of small boats, and the two of them found themselves sitting on a wooden bench of one of them along with the most bored blonde girl Lily had ever seen in her life and a slightly plump girl who was ignoring her surroundings in favour of reading a thick book about something called Quidditch. The blonde gave the two of them an unimpressed glance as they boarded the boat, before turning her gaze to stare with blank disinterest at the waters of the lake. The other girl did not even react to the slight rocking of the boat that their boarding had caused, entirely engrossed in her book. The complete lack of interest from both girls continued even once the fleet of boats started to drift across the lake. In start contrast, Lily and Severus shared looks of pure delight as they both realised that the boats were being moved by magic, and that they were heading towards their first sighting of Hogwarts. 

The manner in which the two girls ignored them also meant that Lily felt no particular embarrassment at keeping her hand firmly grasped in Severus’s, and given the way that he returned the hold she felt reassured that neither did he. They both gasped in awe at their first sight of the castle, standing tall and looking like something out of a wild fantasy with the flaming red sky of the sunset oozing its radiant colours across the turrets. Lily glanced across at Severus, whose eyes were oddly bright and fixed on the sight before them, before returning her gaze to the castle. She almost didn’t notice when the boat arrived at the shore and they were ushered, along with the rest of the first years, into the castle. The blonde still appeared to be bored beyond belief and the Quidditch girl only reluctantly put her book into her satchel for the walk. Almost reluctantly, Lily let go of Severus’s hand.

The other students were already in the Great Hall when the first years entered, the whole place seeming to be majestic with candles floating in the air, so that Lily and Severus failed to pay full attention to the rather fat old man who was placing a tatty old hat on a chair on the dais of the hall. Lily was vaguely aware that the Hat had started to sing, but the exact details of what it was singing washed over her as at that moment Severus had nudged her and hissed, “Look at the ceiling!”

She gazed up in wonderment, awestruck at the sight above her. The ceiling looked all the world as if it was the actual sky she had seen just outside. No one else seemed to be as spellbound as her and Severus, the other first years appearing to be entirely oblivious to the marvel of the world around them. Their reverie was broken by the realisation that something was happening as the fat old man called the first of the first years up to the chair, placing the hat on her head. It was the slightly plump girl who had ignored her surroundings in favour of her Quidditch book. The two of them watched with amazement as after a few moments the hat declared in a loud voice, “HUFFLEPUFF,” and she headed towards the table in the middle of the hall that was decked out in yellow and black where she proceeded to read her book.

They were, Lily quickly realised, being sorted into Houses by the Hat, and in alphabetical order. She shared a glance with Severus. She would be called up before him, as Snape would undoubtably be one of the last few names. Up early, however, was one of the boys they’d met on the train, named “Black, Sirius,”

The Hat appeared to give him some consideration before declaring him to be a Gryffindor, which sent him swaggering toward the red and gold table on the far side of the room. This received a more mixed and uncertain reaction than the Hufflepuff girl had received. For her, there had been some polite claps and cheers, but this pronouncement seemed to be causing a number of the older years to mutter to each other rather than clap. Gryffindor was probably a House to avoid then, Lily thought, if she couldn’t be placed in Slytherin for some reason. She wondered what criteria the strange animated Hat was using to make it’s decisions.

Before she knew it, her name was called and with a final frightened glance at Severus, she found herself walking up to the chair in front of the whole school. _Please Slytherin like Sev_ Lily thought desperately as the Sorting Hat fell down over her head, blocking the Hall from view.

 _…Slytherin? That wouldn’t be my first choice…_ the Hat murmured into her mind, to Lily’s shock, _You seem more the Gryffindor type to me…_

_No, please no, not that_ she begged with all her heart, _I just want to be in Slytherin with Sev._

 _I haven’t even sorted this Sev yet,_ the Hat huffed in annoyance.

 _Slytherin with Sev…_ Lily continued hoping

 _Fine, I supposed bullheaded stubbornness and incomprehensible ambitions can be considered a Slytherin trait at times_ the Hat capitulated and spoke for the whole Hall to hear “SLYTHERIN!”

Lily sighed with relief as the Hat was plucked from her head. She turned and gave Severus a quick smile before turning her gaze to the green and silver table. She hesitated, suddenly uncertain as she struggled to see a place for her to sit, until a blonde boy, clearly one of the upper years gave her a sharp gesture towards the slight gap by him. Relieved, she scurried towards him and gratefully sat down, flashing him a thankful smile.

She watched the rest of the Sorting with a vague sense of distraction, flickering her eyes between whoever the Deputy Headmaster had called out and Severus. He didn’t appear to have any interest in the others in their year as he seemed to be mostly looking at her.

She was rather glad to notice that the other obnoxious boy from the train had joined his friend in Gryffindor, far away from her. The tables were on opposite sides of the room, with the Houses named Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff between them. She was still nervous of course, feeling restless and unable to relax until Severus too was sorted into Slytherin with her. So far she had been enchanted with the magical world, but she didn’t really like this idea of sorting them out like this. She couldn’t imagine anything good becoming of her and Severus being separated.

Finally “Snape, Severus,” was called and he walked to the stool. He paid no attention to the teachers or other students, keeping his eyes fixed on Lily as the Hat was dropped unceremoniously on his head.

 _Slytherin_ Severus thought, the whole idea consuming his consciousness entirely. His eyes were hidden now by the giant hat, but they remained fixed on where Lily had been, the sight of her waiting anxiously at the Slytherin table burned into his mind.

The Hat didn’t bother pointing out that he had the brains of a Ravenclaw, or that no matter how hard he might hide it, deep within he had the courage to put any Gryffindor to shame. The Hat, having already been browbeaten by the first uncooperative first year didn’t even bother pointing out that his wholehearted desire to be with his best friend could actually be considered a rather Hufflepuff show of loyalty. It would probably have chosen Slytherin for him anyway, all things being equal. The Sorting Hat had run out of patience for dealing with uncooperative children who firmly believed themselves to know best, and was somewhat unused to being shown this level of disrespect for what was ultimately its only purpose for existing, so it shouted “SLYTHERIN!” with very little hesitation.

The Hat was raised from his head and he beamed at her. Lily gestured at him to come join her, wriggling inelegantly to open up a space between her and the kind blonde boy beside her. The blonde boy gave her a slightly indignant look, which Lily was entirely oblivious to as her attention was taken up by Severus taking his seat between the two of them. With silent excitement, they watched the rest of the sorting. Having both ended up in the same House, they were now far more at ease and willing to pay attention to the remaining few that followed alphabetically on from Snape.

Once all the first years had been sent to their various Houses by the Hat, the stool and Hat were removed from the hall with a wave of the fat man’s wand. From the table on the dais, a man who looked to be the living embodiment of the word wizard stood up. He was wiry, with a long white beard. Unlike the plain black robes the students wore, his robes were a bright magenta, covered in sparkling silver stars.

“Welcome, students, both new and old, to Hogwarts,” he said as the blonde girl besides Lily gave a surprisingly elegant snort of disgust, his voice carrying easily despite the size of the hall, “Ahead of you lies a year of learning. I hope you will study hard and behave well. But first, we have more important things to attend to - the feast!” With his words, a banquet of food appeared on each of the tables. Lily and Severus both gasped in astonishment, sharing a delighted look. It seemed that so far everything about Hogwarts was amazing them. It was nice at least to have someone to share their excitement with. 

Lily hesitated briefly, a disloyal thought striking her. She had never seen Severus eat with a knife and fork. Sitting next to him, she had a brief moment of fear, unsure of his manners. It was never something she had considered to be important before, but somehow playing by dirty rivers and discussing magic beneath canopied trees was different from the sensation of being watched and judged by a school. She wondered with a hint of fear if what was polite and acceptable in the wizarding world might be different from the muggle world, if all the manners her parents had instilled in her might prove to be wrong. 

She glanced surreptitiously to her left, considering the blonde girl. She was relieved to notice that the way she was holding her cutlery and helping herself to the food in front of them seemed to match up to Lily’s concept of table manners. Just because the castle looked to be from ancient times it did not appear to mean that the social manners were as well. Severus, she noticed, was very carefully copying the blonde boy in his cutlery use. He met her eyes and winced slightly. It was, she realised, the slowest she’d ever seen him eat anything.

The food proved to be the focus of the meal for most of the hall, with the students of all four Houses gratefully eating the food on offer with the panache of starving teenagers. It was a sublime spread, of impressively high quality. It was definitely far superior to the school dinners she had previously had, the observation of which she murmured quietly to Severus. He nodded his agreement, declaring it to be the best food he’d ever encountered in his life.

The blondes either side of them seemed to be watching them. The boy had a slightly curious air, though the girl beside Lily appeared to be glaring at the blonde boy. Opposite them were two large, dark haired boys who looked to be impressively muscular. It occurred to Lily that she had ended up sitting in amongst the upper years, with the other first years being further down the table, which consequently had drawn Severus into the same circumstance. Over their heads, the senior students talked about their summer.

As the food, which had initially looked to Lily to be an extravagant amount, dwindled towards empty plates, the blonde boy abruptly returned his attention to the two first years sandwiched between him and the blonde girl.

“My name is Lucius Malfoy,” he informed them, and it was clear from his tone of voice that this information was important and that they should probably be rather awed by it, “I am a sixth year prefect. These two,” he gestured across the table, “are fifth years, Dominic Goyle and Robert Crabbe,”

Lily and Severus nodded, carefully remembering the names. Lucius continued, his attention switching to the blonde girl, “This is Narcissa Black,”

Narcissa bowed her head slightly to acknowledge the introduction, before asking in a slightly condescending tone of voice that seemed almost to hint at a reluctance to receive an answer, “What are your parents?”

The question confused Lily slightly, so she answered uncertainly, “My dad’s an accountant and my mum’s a housewife?”

“Muggles,” Severus said quietly, and Lily realised he was answering for her, that he’d picked up on what Narcissa was actually asking. Narcissa shifted slightly, opening a little more distance between her and Lily, sending Lucius a dirty look that spoke of great annoyance. Lily looked at Severus in confusion and slight concern, he had after all reassured her that her parents being muggles wouldn’t matter in the slightest once they got to Hogwarts, but he was looking at the cakes that had replaced the main meal of the feast, a strange, thoughtful frown on his face. It was as if he was reasoning through evidence she couldn’t see and drawing a conclusion she didn’t understand.

Pausing, she gave some thought to his words before speaking up suddenly, interrupting whatever Goyle had been starting to say with, “His mother’s a witch,”

Narcissa raised an elegant eyebrow at this interruption, clearly unimpressed. Interrupting probably wasn’t polite, and Narcissa seemed to Lily to be the type of person who cared about good manners.

“Oh,” Narcisssa said, and Lily had never before heard so much pure scorn in one syllable. If it hadn’t been directed toward her, she would almost be impressed. She fell silent, joining Severus in eating the cakes on offer and letting the upper years talk over their heads. They seemed to be discussing the Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, who was apparently new, and how long he would last. She had no opinion on this topic, and was now a little shy about voicing it had she had one. In contrast, it seemed much safer to eat French fancies and Battenberg cake in silence with Severus. She’d never seen French fancies or Battenberg in green and silver before, but was happy to discover that they tasted the same as normal cakes.

“I wonder if the other Houses also have cakes in their colours,” Severus whispered to her and Lily desperately wanted to sneak round and see what was on offer on the other tables. To her disappointment, when the feast was finished and all the students stood up the remaining cakes all disappeared so as they walked past the other tables they didn’t get to see if they had been coordinated to the House colours. 

The whole House walked together, the upper years shepherding the first years through the candle-lit corridors. Lily shivered slightly, certain that she would get lost, feeling a slight chill as they headed down into the dungeons. She was grateful that Severus was beside her, and appreciated him slipping his hand into hers as they walked through the darkened passageways. Just as the view of the castle over the lake and the Great Hall had been magical, images straight out of a fantasy book, the flickering shadows of the dungeons were as ominous as the settings of a horror film.

Luckily, once they entered the Slytherin Common Room it proved to be warm and well-lit. The whole room was bathed in a gentle greenish light, making it look as if they’d stepped into another world. There was something mystical about it, almost as if spells and enchantments lurked in every corner. Despite being in the dungeons, a significant portion of the walls was taken up with large windows, only rather than looking out onto the grounds of the castle both Lily and Severus were delighted to realise that they showed the depths of the lake.

The other years dispersed, clearly familiar with the Common Room, leaving the first years to be presented with their timetables by a prefect who instructed them clearly that they were expected to be on time and well-behaved for all their classes. Taking the proffered parchment almost absentmindedly, Lily and Severus drifted towards one of the windows, gazing in wonder as colourful fish flittered through the green waters.

“Oh Sev,” Lily breathed, “This is amazing,”

He shared a wonderstruck smile with her, before returning his attention to the sight before them. It had been a long day, and not everything had been strictly speaking pleasant, but the idea of living somewhere where the windows showed the depths of a lake filled with all sorts of mystical, magical creatures made him happy. He didn’t want to think too much about anything else, just focus on the joys of standing with Lily watching the fish swim by. Lily was just as happy to let the strange light wash over her and enjoy the beauty of her new home. 

It was into this relaxed feeling of being pleasantly full and almost ready to head up the stairs to her new bed that Lily overheard Narcissa hissing just within her hearing, “What was all that about?”

She sounded angry, the irritated edge that had been present in her tone for the entire feast was now front and centre. Lily shivered slightly, edging closer to Severus and continuing to gaze in wonder at the depths of the lake before them.

“Narcissa…” Lucius appealed gently, sounding awkward.

“Is this some kind of desperate ploy to be Head Boy?” she continued, and Lily could see her reflection in the window stalking closer to where Lucius was sitting languidly, bringing their conversation into better range of her hearing.

“It was a small gesture, nothing more. I will not allow Dumbledore to look down on the Malfoys or Slytherin,” Lucius fired back, his tone proud, “To shame them in front of the school would have shamed us, surely you can see that?”

Narcissa did not sound to be appeased by this, continuing, “The mudblood can’t help it, poor girl. She and her parents weren’t to know what a disgusting affront to nature they had birthed, living in ignorant muggle filth. She deserves pity for her existence, though nothing more,” Lily realised like a blade to the heart that they were talking about her, her and Severus, “But the boy Lucius. A halfblood. Not just one whose blood has been polluted by interbreeding with mudbloods, but an actual halfblood. An abomination of the natural order of things. Unlike her brainless parents, his mother was a witch. A pureblood witch. A pureblood witch who chose to defile herself by lying with a muggle. A pureblood witch who had so little pride, so little respect for our world, for our traditions that she bore a child with a muggle. He should have been drowned at birth, put down like the animal he is. Her I can almost accept, being lost in the ignorant muggle world until it was too late. She can have a use, no doubt. Out of sight, out of mind. Somewhere she does not come into contact with proper people. But he should never even have existed. His mother has shamed us all by having carnal knowledge with something as bestial as a muggle, to bearing it’s child and to allowing it to live. He is an affront to everything that is good. An affront to the years of tradition and magic that we all hold dear. He is everything wrong with the world, and we need a solution. That solution is not to allow them to sit with us, to touch us. What filth might we have contracted?”

Lily felt tears welling up in her eyes. She glanced across at Severus, hoping that he was too focused on the magic around them and the mermaid who had appeared curiously before them to have heard what the older students were saying. He didn’t seem to be paying any attention to anything other than the glorious vision in front of them, but it was always hard to tell from his face. She continued listening, each word cutting deep.

“We are Slytherins,” Lucius was saying calmly, “Regardless of the fact that they are mudbloods, we cannot reject them. Malfoys have been Slytherins for as long as records exist. We value family tradition, and that includes the importance of the House. You know that Dumbledore dislikes us, the muggle-loving fool. To reject them outright in front of all the school will bring nothing but condemnation and yes, interfere with my ambitions for Head Boy. Slytherins stand together as a united front, as we always have done. We hold the traditions of this school in greater standing than the other Houses. I will not let the House be fractured before the world,”

Narcissa did not seem impressed, angrily expelling her breath to continue, “The Blacks are as old as the Malfoys, and we hold the importance of blood purity to be sacred above all other traditions,” she informed him angrily, “And now not only have you associated with those two mudbloods, you have made me publicly associate with them too. The shame…”

She turned on her heel and flounced away sharply towards the direction of what was clearly her dormitory. Lucius remained where he was, and Lily could see a stubborn yet pensive expression on his face reflected in the window. He didn’t seem to be happy with the outcome of the argument, yet he was simultaneously clearly unwilling to back down.

“We should go to bed,” Severus said, breaking through her thoughts. She nodded, unwilling to meet his eyes, and they separated to go to their new beds for their first night as students of Hogwarts.


	3. Chapter 3

Lily woke up the following morning when the bell rang and scrambled out of bed along with the three other girls she shared the room with. None of them had really spoken to her the night before, which was understandable given that it had been a long day and until she’d gone to bed she’d spent all her time with Severus. Now they were all rushing to get ready for their first day of school, brushing their teeth in the bathroom and flinging on their robes, so once again there wasn’t really time for making conversation. Or at least, there wasn’t time for them to make conversation with Lily. The bored blonde that she and Severus had shared their boat with as they sailed over the lake to Hogwarts had also been sorted into Slytherin. Her name was Ethel Hubble and she still seemed to be bored with everything including her bed, which was at the end of the row. Lily’s bed was the opposite end, which possibly made her more isolated from casual conversation, she considered as she shoved her books for the day into her satchel. The girls in between them were making conversation of sorts with Ethel, however, and the three of them had stood together as they brushed their teeth, leaving a clear gap between them and Lily. 

Narcissa’s words from the previous night echoed through her mind, but she tried not to let them upset her. Narcissa was only one person, and the reason the girls had yet to exchange even the most basic of greetings with her was almost certainly just because the previous day they’d had no chance. They made friends with each other and Lily was determined to believe that they would become her friends once she had a chance to talk to them. It was just unfortunate that her and Severus had not been seated with them during the Welcome Feast, but they would undoubtably be time during breaks in class and at lunchtime to get closer to them, not to mention all the evenings she would presumably be spending in her dormitory before bed. She wondered what the boys were like, and if Severus had already made friends with them. She hoped they were nice, just as she hoped that the three girls she was to room with for the next seven years would prove to be nice.

The dormitory was of a decent size, with a small bathroom containing a shower none of them had opted to use that morning attached to it. Their trunks were all placed at the ends of their four poster beds, which had thick curtains to provide some privacy. The bed had proved to be extremely comfortable, a conclusion Lily had reached based mainly around the fact that she’d fallen asleep almost instantly and woken up feeling pleasantly refreshed and ready to face her first day as a trainee witch.

Hogwarts was a big place and she was still worried about getting lost, as well as the prospect of making new friends, but she was feeling more optimistic about classes. Somehow the prospect of her first day learning, really starting her new life at Hogwarts, made all the negative experiences of the day before seem less important. She trooped down the stairs with the other girls to wait by the entrance to the Common Room with the boys. It was still new enough of an experience that she felt a thrill from wearing her plain black robes, and being surrounded by her classmates in theirs. As they waited for a prefect to guide them to the Great Hall for breakfast, Severus materialised by her side, clutching his tatty old satchel. His expression of excitement was undoubtably mirrored in her own face. She hoped, however, that her hair looked slightly better than his.

Breakfast was in many ways a hassle. Lily and Severus sat together and ate what was on offer but neither of them could remember what it was that they had eaten. It was clear that they were the only ones so excited about the prospect of class, as two of the girls from Lily’s dormitory were complaining about how they weren’t looking forward to having to touch anything disgusting in Potions. 

This was in stark contrast to Severus’s whispered comment of “We’re going to make actual real magical potions in an actual real class, today!”

Lily found that she was in agreement with him, as the prospect of making actual magical potions that did actual magical things was far more exciting than maybe having to handle newt eyeballs. That was after all the whole point of being a witch, she’d always assumed. Long before she met Severus and discovered that magic was real she’d entertained herself by brewing magical potions out of whatever disgusting ingredients she could find. Normally, this had resulted in her mother yelling at her. After meeting Severus she had introduced him to this game of make-believe, which he had added a degree of actual knowledge to and they had had great fun making all sorts of disgusting concoctions. This had still resulted in her being yelled at by her mother, but Lily still felt it was definitely worth it. 

It was a relief that they had each other. Even though unlike Lily, Severus had grown up knowing about magic for about as long as he could remember, he was still excited about the prospect of learning how to cast actual real spells. They’d both struggled to decide which of all the various classes marked on their timetable they were the most excited for, as all of them sounded amazing. The other Slytherin first years seemed to be so used to magic that they were almost bored before even beginning. Lily wondered if she’d ever become so used to magic that she’d be able to treat it with such a casual, blasé attitude. Maybe to the other first years something like maths would seem exotic or exciting. 

Lily didn’t think she’d ever grow tired of the idea of having classes like charms or transfiguration marked on her timetable. Even the least magical subjects like Astronomy and History of Magic sounded exciting to her. History was fascinating and obviously she’d only learnt about muggle history at primary school. The idea of there being all sorts of elements of history that her primary school teachers had never encountered filled her with curiosity. Maybe it was because she didn’t come from a magical background, but the idea of the history of magic thrilled her. She was almost eager for whatever homework she’d be set, and the chance to explore all the textbooks undoubtably stocked in the Hogwarts library.

While she did partially want to start off with the really uncompromisingly magical subjects, in some ways she was also slightly glad that their first day wasn’t going to be purely spell casting. It actually looked like it might involve no spells at all, which was both disappointing and also somewhat reassuring. The morning was going to be dedicated to Herbology, which didn’t sound like it was going to be spell-heavy. History of Magic likewise sounded like it would be fascinating but theoretical, though Lily did wonder if time travel was possible with magic, as that would definitely make for an exciting way of learning history. Either way, it promised to be interesting. The day’s classes would end with Potions, where there was the most potential for them to do actual magic. Aside from the obvious spell-casting, it was the brewing of potions that was the most obviously magical in her mind. Even before she knew that magic was real, she knew that witches brewed potions.

The prefect who guided them to the greenhouses for their first class at Hogwarts was Lucius Malfoy from the night before. Lily was glad that they were being guided about for the first two weeks of term, as otherwise there would be no chance of her finding her way anywhere. Hogwarts in the daytime was just as majestic as it had been the previous night, despite the fact that clearly most of it wasn’t used as classrooms. The grounds also seemed to extend in all directions, which made Lily feel quite small. 

After shooing them all into one of the greenhouses, Lucius Malfoy turned sharply on his heel in an elegant flurry of black robes and walked smartly back towards the castle, though not before giving the woman who was clearly their teacher a courteous bow. Inside the greenhouse there were a number of stools, with small attached desk arms that folded out with magic to provide a small desk for them to write on, which the class of first years sat down in. Whether it was intentional or not, they separated themselves into House affiliations. Ethel still appeared to be bored and disinterested with everything around her as she took her seat and gave her textbook a look of utter contempt. Lily was starting to wonder whether she really was so dismissive of reality in general or whether it was just the way her face was naturally. Alternatively, she might just be really uninterested in plants. Lily didn’t like to judge people without due cause. 

“Hello my dears” the short, smiling woman standing in front of them started, “I am Professor Sprout and I will be teaching you Herbology. Some of you may already know me as the Head of Hufflepuff. Herbology may not be as glamorous as some of the other subjects on offer, but it is taught as a core subject for a reason. It is deeply interwoven with the other subjects, particularly Potions, Defence Against the Dark Arts and Care of Magical Creatures, and provides a good basis for all of your magical endeavours. Some of the most modest plants play truly important roles in our daily lives, and you only need to look to the Whomping Willow so recently planted in the grounds to see that plants can be dangerous and should be treated with an appropriate level of caution. As such, we will be starting today by studying the humble nettle. Nettles are common and pose very little risks to you, making them a good starting point. However, should you accidentally touch their leaves you will find that their sting can be quite unpleasant, though it will do you no actual harm. I do however recommend that you wear gloves when handling them. They have a wide variety of uses, showing that even the most humble of plants can be crucial for our society,”

If Lily was going to be perfectly honest, the fact that her first class was going to be focused on nettles was slightly disappointing, but at the same time the fact that they weren’t starting with anything really dangerous was probably for the best. Besides, the idea that the nettles that she’d spent so many years wading through with Severus back in dull old Cokeworth actually had potentially magical properties did add a little bit of glamour to her childhood. It even gave her a slight thrill at the weekend they’d spent intentionally walking through nettles to the point that the stings didn’t bother them anymore so they could hide from the adults (and Petunia) without having to constantly rub dock leaves on their stings. So she made careful notes as Sprout lectured them about the various types and uses of nettles, seeing Severus do the same from the corner of her eye.

She’d initially been uncertain about how writing with a quill would work, but after one attempt over the summer she’d been relieved to discover that it was very similar to using a fountain pen. The only real different was that she’d never accidentally poked herself in the eye with a feather while using a fountain pen before, but aside from that it wrote nicely on the parchment. It was also lucky that she’d never been the type to chew her pen, unlike Petunia, as a mouthful of feather would almost certainly be unpleasant.

After Herbology came History of Magic, which Lily and Severus were delighted to discover was taught by an actual ghost. The fact that he seemed determined to bore his class to death was considerably less exciting. It also explained why a large number of the class had not bothered getting out any parchment or their textbooks when they had taken their seats. In fact, Potter had withdrawn a small red and gold pillow from his bag and started sleeping before Binns had even arrived, which had made Black hoot with laughter and claim loudly that he’d be doing the same next lesson. It had also made Lily very glad to be at the opposite end of the room and in an entirely different House.

Ethel still looked incredibly bored, but for the first time Lily could understand why. Binns had the kind of voice that just droned on in a monotone. He also didn’t appear to pay any attention to his students, seemingly not caring in the slightest that well over half the class was blatantly sleeping and that the remainder were struggling to stay conscious. She glanced at Severus sitting besides her who gave her a glum look in between scrawling dates and names on the parchment in front of him. She doodled a cartoon ghost saying ‘Boo!’ and showed it to him, which made him smile.

As a consequence, they were both a little dispirited at lunch, unlike most of the other first years who were well-rested.

“You’d think that being taught by a ghost would be exciting…” Lily complained over her jacket potato, which she’d smothered in baked beans.

“It’s such a shame, it’s so perfect the idea of a ghost teaching history…” Severus sighed, drowning his potato in melted butter and cheese in disappointment, “But I think we might learn more by just reading in our own time…”

“How are the other boys?” Lily asked, curious. She’d notice that just like the way in which the girls seemed to be putting some space between her and them, he had been avoiding the boys he roomed with. They weren’t exactly making any effort to be anywhere near him either, and she wasn’t sure if it was her imagination or not but it looked to her rather like one of the boys had physically forced the other to sit between him and them when they sat down for lunch. It was not intentional on her part, though she wasn’t entirely sure about Severus, but while they were sitting at the Slytherin table they were at the very end and it definitely felt like there was a gap between them and the other first years. 

Severus shook his head and shrugged vaguely, not appearing to be willing to answer the question. Lily supposed it was too early to tell for sure. She hoped they were nice, but neither of them seemed to be particularly friendly. 

The prefect who shepherded them from lunch to the Potions classroom, deep in the dungeons, was once again Lucius Malfoy, who once again gave their teacher a courteous bow. Lily remembered the way that Narcissa had accused him of aiming for the position of Head Boy the night before, and the way in which he had cooly acknowledged that ambition. She wondered if the effort he was putting into carefully ensuring that the first years were all safely shown to and from their lessons was in part connected to this, as the other Slytherin prefect that had ushered them between Herbology and History of Magic had not bothered to make her presence known to Sprout, though Lily could understand that there might not be much point in expecting Binns to notice which prefects were doing their duties and which were not. Binns probably wouldn’t notice if the entire class died, or possibly left mid-way through the lecture.

The Potions Master was the Deputy Headmaster from the Welcome Feast. Now that she was less distracted by the glory of the Great Hall in all its finery, Lily could focus more on him, though the atmosphere of the dungeon classroom did vie for her attention as well. He was old, though not nearly as old as Dumbledore, and impressively fat. He had a small amount of pale, wispy hair still clinging to his head, though the crown was entirely bald. His robes were clearly well made despite not being at all ostentatious, being a rich deep velvet green. He and Lucius shared a mutual bow, and Lily wished she understood whatever political power play was being negotiated in front of her. She took a seat next to Severus at the front of the class and they both removed their textbooks from their satchels. Like their satchels, Severus’s was in considerably worse condition than hers.

She could feel their teacher’s eyes passing thoughtfully over them, as he surveyed the class. It felt as if they were being judged in some way, though she had no idea what the criteria was. She hoped that she passed his silent assessment. He made them wait, almost as a test of their patience, before he began by introducing himself as Professor Slughorn, Potions Master, Head of Slytherin and Deputy Headmaster. Like Sprout he took the register, though the thoughtful smile he gave each of them was different from the brisk way in which she had done it. Binns hadn’t bothered with a register, which may have been because he couldn’t hold material things or possibly because he didn’t care. Despite the gloomy darkness of the classroom, Slughorn proved to be a cheerful and kindly teacher. He didn’t lecture them for long, merely guiding them through some basic aspects of safety before giving them a page in their textbooks and sitting back to allow them their first attempt at brewing.

They were brewing in pairs, which allowed the class to gain a low level hum of chatter as they worked. This would have been quite pleasant, had Lily not been able to hear Potter and Black. The curved nature of the room meant that they weren’t direct behind her and Severus, but they weren’t directly to their side either, but rather diagonally behind her. Severus, in the corner as much as it was possible to be in a corner of a room without corners, was undoubtably in a better position for avoiding hearing what they were saying. Lily rather envied his position as it was quite clear that neither Potter nor Black were capable of being silent for any significant period of time and it was really quite distracting when she was trying to concentrate on the recipe in front of her. The fact that her and Severus seemed to be a focal point of their muttering did not help. It appeared that they had made as much of an impression on the Gryffindors as they had on them. The dislike appeared to be entirely mutual.

Very carefully, Lily and Severus measured out the correct amount of beetle eyes, checking the recipe in the textbook far more than they probably needed to. Severus had even compared the recipes in their two textbooks, skimming through it to check if they were the same as his book was considerably older than hers. It occurred to Lily that she should probably remember to bring a hair bobble to class with her as she didn’t really want to accidentally dip her hair into her cauldron. 

“Lucky you managed to get Gryffindor, or you’d have to sleep in the same room as that,” Lily heard Potter say, the words drifting to her over the hum of the class discussing their potions. ‘That’ was clearly Severus, who was scratching his head absentmindedly as the fire heated up underneath their cauldron, reading and rereading the recipe.

“Thank Merlin, they probably have fleas,” was Black’s response.

Lily ignored him, moving closer to Severus to carefully crush the dried nettles, sprinkling them into their potion. It changed to a dull blue as it was supposed to and she felt a thrill of delight at the instant proof of something happening, especially after having spent the morning learning about nettles. Severus stirred gently, mixing all the dried nettle flakes in as she watched, waiting for the right moment to add the pufferfish spine. Throughout the entire process Lily could hear the mutterings coming from behind her, even as she tried to focus on Severus and their potion. They commented on all manner of things, such as Severus’s second hand robes and text book, his hair and nose, the manner in which both of them were seriously paying attention to their classes as evidenced by their attempt at brewing before moving on to insult her hair for being a gingery red.

“Do you think she’s some kind of Weasley?” Black continued, clearly not concentrating on his potion as much as he should have been. Or maybe, Lily wondered, to people who had grown up in the magical world this was easy and they didn’t need to concentrate or get used to it like her and Severus. It was something she’d like to ask, but there didn’t seem to be any candidates for that kind of conversation. The closest she had to an expert on growing up magical was Severus and knowing about magic did not erase the fact that Spinner’s End was about as magical as a dead slug. She wished she knew what a weasley was, as she had no idea if she was one or not or how something like that was even judged.

“In Slytherin? Doubt it. She’s some kind of evil carrot-top,” Potter replied, not providing Lily with any hint as to what a weasley was. The fact that it was this comment and not anything else that finally made Lily lose her temper was something she would later be deeply embarrassed about. Grabbing the ginger root that Severus had just handed her so she could grate it, she turned and threw it straight at him. A childhood of tossing cricket balls with first her father and later Severus had given her a pretty good aim, so it hit him right in the middle of his forehead, before bouncing off to land with a splash in their cauldron. The smug satisfaction she felt at the shocked looks on his and Black’s face was sadly short lived.

“Evans, Snape,” Slughorn commented dryly, not moving an inch from his seat, “I would prefer it if you didn’t throw the ingredients. If you must behave like uncivilised animals then you can do so in detention with Filch this Saturday, rather than my class,”

Lily winced and the shocked expression on Black and Potter’s face swiftly changed to mirth, with them both sniggering to each other in clear enjoyment at the result. She looked guiltily at Severus, who clearly had not expected the ginger root to go flying towards the Gryffindors rather than be grated for their potion. He cautiously picked up another piece of ginger and hesitated.

“I’m sorry, I’ll grate it this time,” Lily said, and he gingerly handed it to her, watching carefully. She determinedly grated it, doing her best to block out the chuckles coming from behind her, which were obviously also bothering Severus to some extent too. 

“Black, Potter, assuming you are not too badly injured, I hope that you will be able to quietly continue with your brewing,” Slughorn continued, silencing their laughter.

Luckily, the rest of the class passed without any significant incident and their potion was a success, but neither Lily or Severus felt that the day had been an ideal start.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The original plan for this chapter included two more scenes. One of them I just booted because it was out of character, the other I kicked down to next chapter as including it would have made it too long.
> 
> I am very grateful to anyone who takes the time out of their day to read this, let alone do something as generous as comment. It does reassure me a little. I have to admit that I find writing a lot easier than posting. Takes me ages to decide to post, let alone the amount of delaying of the final button click.

Filch turned out to be the name of the caretaker, as they found on the detention slips they received by owl at breakfast the next morning. Getting post by owl was in many ways deeply exciting. The fact that it was a detention slip was considerably less exciting, but it did rather lessen the blow to an extent. At least that meant they would get to experience a magical detention at least once, Lily thought in an attempt to be optimistic. She also rather hoped that it would be the last detention she had for a while, ideally the entirety of her time at Hogwarts. 

Their second day of classes involved actual spellwork, which was incredibly exciting for both Severus and Lily. They had both done magic before, and had read parts of their textbooks in eager preparation for their classes, but actually performing proper spells was different from the unpredictable nature of their accidental magic and obviously seeing the results were a world away from reading about how to flick your wand correctly. 

Lily was extra careful to behave, which was not something she found difficult as such, but Potter and Black did not make it easy. She was glad that outside of class she was always a decent distance away from them, given that they ate at opposite ends of the Great Hall and were assigned to completely different Common Rooms. The separation into Houses also meant that with the exception of those two Gryffindors she, along with Severus, had in effect not exchanged a single word with anyone outside of Slytherin. Lily had also not exchanged many words with anyone in Slytherin, except Severus, but he didn’t really count as far as she was concerned. She was extremely grateful that she had him, but talking to him didn’t constitute a new friendship seeing as they’d been best friends for years. It was rather like comparing a pet hamster to a herd of wild deer, a comparison she wisely chose not to share with Severus. She wasn’t convinced that he would be flattered to hear himself described as her pet hamster. In all fairness, he wasn’t very hamster-like, mainly because he was far too skittish and liable to bite. He was more like some kind of strange wild animal that she alone had managed to tame, though once again she wisely chose not to tell him this. 

She had managed to have the briefest of conversations with one girl in her dormitory, called Madeleine Hardbroom. Madeleine had a permanently frazzled look about her, which only seemed to increase when Lily had tried to talk to her. Unfortunately, not only had the conversation been incredibly short and lacking in substance, but Lily had also had the distinct impression that Madeleine had been unwilling to talk to her at all and was only prevented from escaping the conversation any earlier by impeccable manners. She had no idea if Severus had had more luck with the boys in their year, but she rather suspected not given that he appeared to be avoiding them in favour of spending as much time as was physically possible with her. She wasn’t objecting to this as she was also keen to spend time with him. It was nice to have something comfortingly familiar in a strange new place, especially seeing as it seemed to be faintly unwelcoming. She wondered if it was harder for any other first years, who hadn’t been lucky enough to go to Hogwarts with their neighbourhood best friend, but she also assumed that to virtually everyone else the magical world wasn’t particularly new or interesting.

Lily and Severus found after approximately five minutes into their first Defence Against the Dark Arts class that they agreed with what the older Slytherins had thought about the chances of the teacher lasting the entire year. He didn’t seem like he would be able to defend himself against anything, including a class of untrained eleven year olds. Given that the class, as all children can, could smell blood, they for the most part ignored his attempts at teaching. Lily and Severus struggled resolutely, despite the very animated discussion about the Quidditch season that was going on amongst the majority of the class, to pay attention to their teacher’s almost hesitant lecture. They hadn’t even been able to catch his name, either because he had muttered it to quietly for them to hear or, as was equally possible, he may simply not have bothered mentioning it.

Their notes consisted mainly of making confused annotations with question marks in their textbooks, constantly glancing across at each other’s textbook to see if they were different. An awful lot of what their teacher was telling them, from what they could make out, contradicted the claims in their books. Had it just been Severus’s book that contained different information they might have put it down to it being second hand and therefore out of date, but Lily’s book had been bought new recently enough that she hoped it was correct. It was the textbook the school had instructed her to buy, so it made sense that it would contain the correct information. But it also made no sense that their teacher was wrong, so they both marked down the contradictory information with the resigned acceptance that they would have to locate the library and figure out from the resources there what to trust. One piece of information that he mumbled incoherently, regarding the kappa, was different from what was in both their books, which also contained vastly contradictory information, so they made sure to note down all three possibilities, underlined and accompanied by many question marks. 

Luckily they did not do any practical spellwork, which was disappointing in a way but also meant that the class did not lock the teacher in the cupboard which Severus whispered seemed likely. He had been to a rougher primary school that her, so she assumed he had plenty of experience with that sort of thing and so trusted his judgement in these matters. 

Lily realised she could probably throw pretty much anything her heart desired at the Gryffindor boys without being punished, but she felt no particular desire to do so. She giggled slightly as she imagined Severus’s reaction to her throwing the chair she was sitting on at Potter, which resulted in him giving her a curious and slightly alarmed look. Admittedly, the topic that their teacher seemed to be talking about was either the ways in which the kappa killed people or maybe the ways in which the kappa could be killed, it was a little hard to tell, so Lily’s amusement was rather strange without the context of her inner thoughts.

“Nothing,” she said breezily, not concerned about talking in this class. If anything the only worry with talking to Severus was that he might not be able to hear her over the din behind them. Lily didn’t know what Quidditch was, but she found that she didn’t particularly care. He nodded in acceptance, letting it slide.

By contrast, their Transfiguration teacher was clearly not a woman to be crossed. She gave her name clearly in a voice that carried strongly as Professor McGonagall. She was the youngest teacher they’d had so far at Hogwarts, which given that one of their teachers had been a ghost wasn’t necessarily a great comparison, but it was obvious from the first lesson that she was a strict disciplinarian. She taught clearly, enabling Lily and Severus to make clear notes. She also demonstrated to them that along with detention and losing points, there were other methods of punishment available to their teachers, much like there would be at any school. 

While some of the other teachers had allowed for a small amount of levity in their classrooms, some through careful control and some through their clear inability to control their classes, she did not. This became apparent quite quickly when, after a boisterous Defence class, Black had continued joking around with Potter in Transfiguration. As punishment, she had delivered a couple of sharp lashes with a simple strip of leather to his palm. It had ensured the rest of the class was silent. It didn’t seem to do much to dampen Black’s spirits, though it did appear to quieten his tongue somewhat.

Lily and Severus exchanged looks, both glad that they had only received detention the day before and also somewhat dreading what detention might entail. There were no real guarantees that it would be any better or worse than the belt. Given that it was a castle with dungeons, it was entirely possible that detention involved some form of medieval torture such as being suspended by manacles. They had already figured out that while losing points was undoubtably the easiest punishment to receive on a personal level, it was also the one that was most likely to make them unpopular with their House.

Why anyone would want to do anything other than pay enraptured attention to their teacher followed by completely focusing on the spell they were practising was beyond Lily. Severus appeared to be in complete agreement with her, and they were both delighted when they successfully transfigured their egg cup into a small goblet. It was a glorious start, and they were both looking forward with a vibrating impatience to the later chapters of their textbook when they would be able to move on to more complicated spells like changing pincushions into hedgehogs. 

As a consequence of the day, they spent a certain amount of Friday evening sitting on the floor in a corner of the Common Room, wondering what a magical detention could be like. The corner was nicely isolated from the rest of the room, as it appeared few other House members were willing to sit on the floor, and it gave them a gorgeous view through the windows into the depths of the lake. Sitting there gazing at the blue-green waters swirling in front of their eyes, it was easy to be charmed by the glory of the magical world regardless of the topic of discussion. 

They hadn’t had detentions at their primary schools, so all they had to go off were the tales that Petunia had told Lily. Petunia had obviously never had a detention in her life, as she had repeatedly told Lily rather smugly, but she had heard tales. They wondered how different it would be in a magical school. Both of them were glad that they had only received detention rather than a caning. McGonagall had used the belt herself, physically, but they both wondered if there were other, magical methods of striking children that the teachers might use. Logically it made sense that there would be, but neither of them were particularly keen to experiment with bad behaviour to discover what they might be.

“It’s not like it were that bad,” Severus pointed out, “It were just a knob of ginger…”

Lily sighed, fiddling with her detention slip, “I’m sorry though, I got us both in trouble,”

Severus was silent for a moment, watching a fish swim lazily around the dark green waters.

“I wish you’d used beetle eyes or something.” He said suddenly, a slightly malicious tone flashing through his voice, “Then it would have splattered all over their faces…”

“Then it’s your fault for not handing me beetle eyes,” Lily said with a snort, looking up at him with a wicked grin as she likewise imagined the considerably more dramatic reaction that she would have received had she thrown something gooey. The beetle eyes would no doubt have splattered not only all over Potter’s face and glasses, but also some would have hit Black too. A handful of beetle eyes would have been harder to aim with though, and there was a good chance that Slughorn would have been angrier with her.

Severus gave her a wounded look. As accusations went, it was a rather unfair one Lily had to admit. 

“Don’t tell Petunia,” she asked him quietly and he gave her an incredulous look. It was a sudden change of subject, and one that he struggled to understand fully.

“She’ll tease me,” Lily implored miserable, well aware that her sister would definitely disapprove of her not only misbehaving but being given a detention so quickly. 

“When would I have a chance to? We don’t speak?” Severus said with a hint of annoyance. He and Petunia shared a mutual dislike, so they rarely spoke outside of a few passing words mainly focused around Lily. Lily didn’t seem comforted by his logic however, so he reassured her with a sighing, “I won’t tell her, ever,”

When Saturday morning came, they met in the Common Room fully dressed in their uniform black robes, determined to not be late for their first detention. They walked carefully along the corridors following a rough map that they had been sent along with their detention slip, both a little nervous. Lily was infinitely grateful that Severus had been given detention along with her, despite realising that it was unfair. She felt a little bad, but not bad enough to have in any way protested. She didn’t want to be suspended from her ankles and whipped with a cat-o-nine-tails alone. Admittedly, she didn’t think that was particularly likely, given that they had been sent to the caretaker rather than some kind of punishment or torture master. She wasn’t sure if one of them existed.

“Sorry,” Lily said, in what was possibly not the most sincere tone of voice she had ever used, “But I am really really glad you’re here with me,”

Severus gave her a long suffering look. He didn’t seem to be overly enthusiastic about the awaiting detention, though he like her had not protested against his punishment. The wounded looks he had given her did not count, as far as Lily was concerned.

The caretaker’s office was dingy, though given the lighting in the school a lot of places were dingy. There was no electricity, Lily and Severus had been fascinated to realise, with everything being lit either by the sunlight through the windows or by candles. A lot of the candles floated in the air, and Lily had been so surprised by that realisation earlier in the morning that she had stopped dead in the corridors on the way to Transfiguration, causing Madeleine to walk into her, knocking them both over. Severus had turned round to see what had happened to her, having realised that his conversation partner had vanished, meaning that he had collided with one of the Gryffindor boys that Lily thought was called Petti-something and Severus had thought was a Hufflepuff. This had earned them all the exasperated glare of the prefect shepherding the Slytherin first years, though luckily no punishment except the indignity of having to scrabble around on the floor for their books.

The caretaker, a relatively young man compared to the average age of the Hogwarts staff, looked like he suited dingy places though. He reminded Lily somewhat of a mushroom, in that there was an air about him that suggested that he belonged in damp corners and might possibly be poisonous. He squinted at them in the insufficient light of the room, holding the detention slips they nervously presented him with up to best catch the sunlight that trickled in weakly through the window. As far as they could see, there were no floating candles in the office. Lily wasn’t sure what it was that the wizarding world had against lighting, but she also accepted that it may well be the case that the caretaker had been lighting his office in some alternative magical manner she couldn’t comprehend until they had knocked on his door. Lily smiled brightly at him, opting to be as cheerful as she possibly could be about the upcoming punishment. She hoped it wouldn’t be too unpleasant. Severus, by contrast, was settling for stoic reluctance. He wasn’t smiling, but neither was he glaring. He was simply standing beside her, waiting. He was probably more used to punishments than Lily, she realised, feeling slightly guilty once more for accidentally getting him involved.

Filch handed them each a variety of cleaning supplies and led them in what Lily suspected wasn’t the most direct manner through the twisting and confusing corridors of the castle to a room that was at best dimly lit. The sole light source was the window, through which sunlight was not exactly streaming in as they were clearly on the wrong side of the castle to catch the morning light. There were a number of candle holders attached to the walls, like there were in a number of the classrooms and corridors in addition to the considerably more interesting floating ones. Filch walked round the room, lighting each one individually. To both Lily and Severus’s deep disappointment he did this with matches rather than a grand flourish of magic. Neither of them found matches to be particularly interesting given that they were perfectly common in the muggle world.

“Polish the trophies,” he said gruffly, the first words he had spoken to them, gesturing towards the assorted cleaning supplies they had brought with them. Lily and Severus nodded their understanding, rummaging through the supplies. They seemed relatively clearly labelled, even if the brands were all entirely different from the ones they were used to.

Quietly, they set about the task of carefully polishing the various trophies. A lot of them seemed to be Quidditch related, though given that the lighting was poor due to the candles being stationary and attached to the walls, it was hard to be entirely certain. It also made judging whether or not they were adequately polished to be a difficult task. Lily quickly realised that while Severus was perfectly capable of the mechanics and hard work involved with cleaning, his judgement in the matter was limited. She personally agreed with his assessment that it was ultimately irrelevant how much some trophies shut up in a remote room of the castle shone, and that the entire concept was utterly facetious, but she had at the very least grown up with her mother who polished the brass in their house every week so between the two of them they were able to produce some extremely shiny trophies. Or at least, they looked shiny in the dimly reflected flickering candle light. In proper electrical lighting or a direct hit from the sun, chances were that the trophies would look dusty, smeared and old. One of them was actually quite badly dented when Lily started polishing it, so she had very gently given it a cursory wipe with her rag and swiftly moved on to the next one in the hope that no one would notice, or more importantly, that she wouldn’t be the one to receive the blame. 

Severus had of course scratched his head part way through their cleaning session, smearing grimy dirt and cleaning fluid all the way through his hair. Lily had wrinkled her nose at this, but he’d just wrinkled his back. He had more nose to wrinkle with, so by Lily’s logic he won.

“You’ve got grot on your face,” he told her, which she accepted made perfect sense. It was hard to clean without touching yourself, and she had paused half way through to tie her hair back, which had presumably added a certain element of grime to her plait. 

She made a unimpressed rasping noise at the back of her throat to properly express her displeasure, before commenting, “We’ll both have to have a proper shower after this. I think I have dust in my eyes and nose…”

Severus looked glum but accepting of the truth of her words, rubbing at his own eyes and smearing a further trail of grime across his face. He froze, clearly realising moments after having done so the consequences of his actions before sighing in sad resignation. Lily giggled, before sneezing as she inhaled some stray dust.

With a reluctant sigh, they returned to their task, though they continued to share amused glances with each other as they noted the growing amount of dirt that was clearly transferring from the presumably rarely visited trophies onto them. As Filch was mostly leaving them to their own devices to focus on his own cleaning, which was disappointingly also by means of the muggle method of mopping, they felt somewhat relaxed. There was something similar to their playing in the scrublands and river banks of Cokeworth, where they would regularly get covered in mud and dirt. Reminded of this, when Lily accidentally managed to wrap an entire spider’s web round her hand, she did as she would have done had they been playing amongst the nettles of Cokeworth and smeared it on Severus’s face. He gave her an unimpressed look, wiping it off as best he could and smearing the remnants through her hair. They both stuck their tongues out at each other, though it was only Severus who consequently ended up spluttering as he got some old spiderweb in his mouth.

When they had finished their polishing, they stood proudly in front on Filch, who gave them a faintly horrified look.

“The point of cleaning,” he said in a slightly strangled voice, “Is not actually to transfer all the dirt onto yourself…”

This demonstrated that he was clearly a lot more familiar with the concept of cleaning than he was with children. His pained expression reminded Lily of the look she tended to receive from her mother whenever she returned home covered from head to toe in mud after a fantastic day of playing outside with Severus. Her mother would always fuss about Lily traipsing dirt all over the house and sigh in reluctant amazement at the sheer quantity of filth that Lily had managed to cover herself in. Admittedly the time they went to the quarry she and Severus had rolled down a mud hill multiple times, shrieking with delight, but normally dirt just seemed to appear as if by magic. She never really noticed it until her mother caught her entering the house and invariably made her strip the worst of her clothes off in the porch.

“We won’t get it anywhere else!” she reassured him brightly, hoping that he wouldn’t hose them down as her mother had often threatened to do, “We’ll go have a shower immediately without touching anything!”

Severus nodded his agreement furiously, an action that actually disturbed a small amount of the dust caught in his hair, but luckily Filch either didn’t notice or didn’t mind.

Filch looked at them suspiciously, before walking round the trophy room to inspect their work. They watched closely, hopeful for a show of magic, but he merely peered at the shelves in the dim light. They waited nervously, dust tickling their nostrils, but he merely nodded in acceptance at their work and blew out the candles fastened to the walls. They imagined that could have been done with a wave of his wand, but he hadn’t even drawn his. They both assumed he must be a wizard, but in a way it was a decent punishment to make them clean in the muggle method without even showing them a hint of magical cleaning. That would have been exciting enough to overrule any suggestion of punishment. Maybe, Lily ruminated as they gathered up the cleaning supplies, he had chosen to make their punishment so very muggle because they had grown up in the muggle world, thereby ensuring that it would be in no way exciting.

Arms once again full of an assortment of now dirty rags, they waited for him to guide them back to the caretaker’s office, from where they would probably be able to navigate their way back to the Common Room. Filch gave them a briefly confused look as they stood waiting for him, before shrugging and leading them through the school. Lily was convinced that it was a different route to the one they had taken to get to the trophy room, meaning that had Filch abandoned them they would no doubt have been hopelessly lost. Severus was a bit better at remembering routes than her, probably because he had been walking himself to school for years so he had been far more accustomed to exploring. Lily had always been a little envious of the way in which his parents left him to his own devices so much. It was only relatively recently that her parents had begun allowing her out without some form of accompaniment, possibly in part due to the fact that she and Severus had generally given Petunia the slip anyway, thereby wearing down her parents’ objections.

After returning the cleaning supplies to their assigned place, Lily and Severus chorused “Thank you Mr Filch,” to the slightly bemused looking caretaker who gruffly dismissed them with a cross between a warning and a plea to not spread the dirt they had covered themselves with around the school. Consequently, they walked very carefully back towards the Slytherin Common Room, doing their best not to shed too much dust or cobwebs in the corridors.


	5. Chapter 5

The Common Room was effectively deserted. This was mainly because the weather was still relatively pleasant, so the majority of the student body was making the most of it and spending the day out of doors. Lily and Severus might well have been doing the same, had they not been given detention and therefore spent their first Saturday morning accidentally transferring many years worth of dust from the Hogwarts Trophy Room onto themselves. The advantage of there being no one in the Common Room meant that there was no one to witness their return, which they were both a little relieved about. Detention and dirt were probably not things to be proud of, so a lack of an audience was a distinct advantage.

“We should shower and change robes,” Lily said with a sigh, feeling some dust tickle the back of her throat, “Then meet back out here?”

Severus nodded his agreement to her plan, though he nodded very gently so as to make sure no dirt was accidentally displaced. They separated to head to their respective dormitories, but Lily hesitated in the doorway to hers. She had felt there was something slightly odd about the way Severus had looked around the room, about the way he had been in general. She pulled the door to, but left it open just enough that she could look out into the Common Room. She felt incredibly silly standing there waiting, watching an empty room, but she did it anyway. She reasoned that she would just hover there for a few moments, just for her own peace of mind, then head to the shower.

However, her shower plans were neatly derailed, much as she had vaguely dreaded, as she observed Severus slinking suspiciously from the boys’ dormitory towards the communal toilets situated off the Common Room, a towel and robe grasped in his hands. Lily loved the school towels. They were green and fluffy, with silver details, and appeared clean every morning. To her it was the height of luxury. She waited a moment longer, thinking, before following after Severus. She didn’t particularly relish the idea of spending more time than necessary in her grimy robes, mainly because she could feel the constant tickle of dust at the back of her throat and nose, but she knew that part of growing up was sometimes doing things that had to be done. She personally felt that she, along with Severus, were remarkably mature in that respect, though Petunia and her mother clearly still regarded them as silly little children.

As far as she was concerned, they had regularly demonstrated responsibility and forward thinking. That spring, they had come to the conclusion that frogs would be a good kind of pet for a young witch and wizard, so they had meticulously made plans. They had quite sensibly decided that Lily’s house, which had a proper bathroom with a proper bath, was a better place to keep frogspawn than Severus’s. They had conveniently ignored minor issues like whether or not the Evans would want to bathe or not. Lily had worn a cardigan with nice big pockets, and they had waded into the pond to scoop frogspawn out into them. Unfortunately, her mother had caught her dripping her way into the house and had been considerably less impressed with their innovative and mature plan, which meant that they had both started their budding magical careers without pets.

She pushed open the door to the communal toilets and stepped inside. Severus looked up at her, startled, his eyes wide. He was crouched over the sink, seemingly rinsing his hair. They looked at each other for a silent moment, Severus dripping dirty water down the plughole. Lily was no more an expert on washing than she was on cleaning, but she felt certain that a cursory rinse in the sink was not going to be quite enough to deal with the grime both of them had ended up liberally covered in.

“What’s wrong with the boys’ shower?” she asked, a hazy suspicion drifting into her mind. Severus chewed his lip uncomfortably, still dripping. 

“Sev?” she said, when he didn’t answer her immediately, a sense of misery setting in.

“…Nowt,” he said quietly, his eyes flicking down away from her gaze, before continuing reluctantly, “Mulciber said the showers were for purebloods only…”

“Oh,” Lily said sadly, the toilets feeling cold and impersonal, “Oh,”

Severus said nothing. Lily felt a degree of gratitude that the girls she shared a dormitory with, while not being exactly welcoming, were at the very least merely ignoring her. It was a little cold and hurtful, but none of them had been explicitly nasty. She was aware that some people disliked people like her and Severus, whose parents weren’t magical and who had been raised in the muggle world, but even Narcissa hadn’t expressed it to her face, merely in her hearing.

“Oh,” she said again, feeling small and powerless, “The girls didn’t say anything like that,”

She wondered if she should have told him that, if maybe that would be nicer not to know, but he smiled weakly.

“That’s lucky,” he said, and she smiled in relief. She paused, thinking. Slowly, she went back to the door to peer carefully at the Common Room. There was still no one there. Smiling suddenly she turned back to Severus.

“Wait!” she instructed him brightly, before dashing quickly to the girls’ dormitory. It too was empty. Delighted, she bounded back to where Severus was frozen, still dripping grey water with a confused expression.

“Come,” she told him firmly, grabbing his wet hand and dragging him unceremoniously after her. Lily would later realise that in her enthusiasm they had indeed shed grime in the Common Room as well as Severus leaving a few splashes of dirty water on the floor, but ultimately no one noticed and even if they did no one connected it to them so she felt no particular reason to care. By the next day it had magically disappeared anyway. Impulsively and utterly convinced of the brilliance of her plan, she drew him into the first year girls’ dormitory bathroom, where she finally released his hand and turned to beam at him. He looked damp, dirty and lost, staring at her with big, dark eyes. He seemed entirely out of place and completely aware of the fact. He shuffled uncomfortably.

She gestured magnanimously towards the shower. He stayed where he was, still dripping, so she pushed him gently into the cubicle and swished the curtain closed with an air of finality. From the cubicle there was silence.

“Pass your clothes out,” Lily said impatiently. She didn’t want to explain this to the other girls. They may not have said anything about whether or not non-purebloods were allowed to use the shower, or indeed whether or not boys were allowed, but the boy part at least was sort of implied.

Almost reluctantly, a dirty black robe was pushed out from under the shower curtain. Lily waited, but no further clothes were forthcoming.

“All your clothes, you can’t shower in your underwear,” she snapped, and was rewarded by a pair of odd socks appearing on top of the robes one at a time. Finally, a pair of ancient pants came forth, to be carefully buried under the dirty robes by Severus’s clearly unwilling hand. She waited, feeling that she was being both exceptionally clever and incredibly patient, but there was no further action from behind the shower curtain.

“Severus…” she asked, suddenly wondering, “Have you ever actually had a shower before?”

They didn’t exactly talk about washing very much, mainly because it was an incredibly boring topic of conversation compared to virtually anything else available to them. Petunia was possibly the only person Lily knew who would rather discuss bathing habits over magic, but Lily had long since accepted that Petunia was a little odd. Petunia seemed to be under the impression that it was Lily and Severus that were odd, but purely considering the numbers Lily knew that mathematically she and Severus outnumbered Petunia two to one so that put them in the majority and made them normal. She had wisely not told Petunia this, but Severus had agreed wholeheartedly with her assessment. He’d even added the perfectly logical argument that even if you considered height, the two of them together were taller than just Petunia on her own, so they were still in the majority. Their ages too, when combined, gave a number bigger than Petunia’s age. 

If he answered, it was too quiet for her to hear, but it didn’t really matter. Lily had lost her patience, which she admittedly didn’t have a huge amount of to start with. Just because she thought that it was a brilliant idea didn’t mean that she wasn’t also aware that other people might not feel quite the same. She wanted both her and Severus to be washed and out of the bathroom by the time any other girls returned. She had become accustomed to people failing to comprehend her genius, so felt it was best not to risk it. Besides, she was getting fed up of the sensation of grime that covered her skin and ticked at her nostrils, so she tore off her clothing with gusto and entered the shower. Severus yelped in surprise and flinched away from her.

“Oh, stop being such a big girl’s blouse,” she snapped, turning the water on. It took her a few twiddles of the knobs before she managed to get a good temperature of water, which didn’t really affect Severus as he was skulking out of range, watching her with wide, alarmed eyes. In some ways, Lily had always thought Severus was a little like a hedgehog. She rather liked him, but she knew he was mostly prickle. She was potentially the only person who got anything remotely soft from him, and she was by now perfectly used to how to best avoid the worst of his spikes. If he told her that he had eaten slugs, she wouldn’t be entirely surprised either. She didn’t tell him any of this, as that was an important part of preventing him from metaphorically rolling into a small ball of spikes and viciously stabbing her, which also made the hedgehog analogy somewhat fail. Maybe a hedgehog with a machete was more accurate. 

“Come on,” she said, standing under the large shower head and allowing the water to turn an unappealing shade of grey. It was a spacious shower, with a generously proportioned head that filled the entire cubicle with warm water and copious amounts of steam. Severus cautiously shuffled under the water, almost as if suspicious it would in some way attack him. Lily wondered if advanced spells might be able to make water into a weapon, because otherwise warm water was fairly unthreatening, especially within the context of a shower.

“It’s warm,” he said, appearing surprised.

Lily picked up the large contained of shampoo and held it out to him, “Shampoo, for your hair,” she said cheerfully. He took it and gingerly sniffed it. He made a gagging sound, and gave it back to her. Lily sniffed it. She didn’t gag, but she had to admit that she did agree that it was rather overpoweringly floral in scent. Rebelliously keeping his eyes fixed on hers, he reached his hand slowly towards the bar of soap. He sniffed that cautiously too, and then proceeded to lather it up and through his hair, all the while maintaining a suspicious eye contact. Lily shrugged and used a small amount of the shampoo, as she didn’t particularly want to smell like she had marinaded herself in petals. She wasn’t his mother, it wasn’t her concern what he used to wash his hair. In many ways, she was tempted to try the soap herself but she didn’t want to waste unnecessary time.

It was in many ways one of the more stressful showers Lily had ever taken in her life. She hadn’t previously ever considered showering to be particularly fun as such, more a necessary task to prevent her mother from yelling at her, but she now accepted that showering while constantly jumping at every slight noise in the fear that it was one of the girls about to catch them made the entire experience one that she would describe as the exact opposite of relaxing. However, while it felt like it lasted forever due to the constant lurking nervousness at the edge of Lily’s consciousness, in reality it was over quickly, leaving the two of them wrapped in the fluffy green towels provided to all the Slytherin students. Lily and Severus assumed the other Houses had towels in their House colours, much like they probably also had bedding in House colours. The Common Room decor, which for them was focused around green with elements of silver, was presumably also related to House colours. 

Once they’d both hurriedly dried and dressed themselves in fresh black robes, they once more had the task of slinking out of the first year girls’ bathroom and back to the Common Room, which was luckily still mostly empty, making the entire operation a success. Severus left her by the lake window, scurrying off to dump his dirty robes in the first year boys’ laundry basket. Lily waited patiently, patting at her still damp hair with a towel. She sat down on the floor, her back leaning against the back of a sofa, watching the faint outlines of fish swim in front of her eyes. The sunlight filtered through the waters, casting a glorious green glow over the whole room.

When he returned, hair still dripping slightly and looking far cleaner than Lily could ever remember seeing him before, he was clutching a thick book that looked like it might have previously lost a fight with a wild bear judging by the slightly tattered state of it. He held it out to her, so she could read the title of _Hogwarts: A History_ emblazoned on the cover.

“We should read this,” he said, “I took all of mum’s books and this was one of them. It might be a bit old but it might have all kinds of information that we could do with,”

Lily wasn’t entirely certain if Eileen had given Severus all of her old books or if she was even aware that he’d taken them all, but it really wasn’t any of her business so she made no comment. Rather, she took the book gingerly to leaf through and consider. It looked to be quite heavy going in terms of content, but definitely fascinating and worthy of interest. She nodded slowly, biting her lip thoughtful as Severus watched.

“Wait here,” she said abruptly, handing the book back to him and rushing off back to the girls’ dormitory, leaving him with a puzzled expression on his face. It was clearly a day when she was full of brilliantly inspired ideas.

He was still there when she returned moments later, looking faintly abandoned, still clutching his book. It was probably the safest way of holding the book, given that it was old enough that Lily wouldn’t be surprised if the odd page fell out.

“We can’t exactly read the same book at the same time,” Lily said sensibly. It wasn’t entirely true, as they could, it would just be complicated and likely lead to arguments as they each attempted to turn the pages at different speeds. They had attempted it once with one of Petunia’s magazines and it had ended in disaster. It had been funny, though for some reason Petunia had been less amused, probably because of the state her magazine had ended up in. Lily hadn’t thought it to be much loss to the world, which was just one of the many things she and her sister disagreed on. There seemed to be so many, an ever increasing amount that just grew exponentially.

“So, we can alternate chapters,” she waved her book, a considerably smaller novel in considerably better condition, at him. He flinched back just in time to avoid being hit on the nose with it, not because Lily had been attempting to hit him but more because she had misjudged the distance in her enthusiasm. He looked between the two books, considering their vastly different sizes quizzically.

“They may have different length chapters…” he pointed out, taking her book in his hands and flicking through it. It was labelled _Charlotte Sometimes_ and was clearly a lighter read than _Hogwarts: A History_ , as well as weighing a lot less.

“We’ll manage,” Lily said optimistically, “Because otherwise we’ll have to wait until the end of the books to discuss things properly and this cuts out all the waiting,”

Patience had never been one of her virtues. Severus was similarly unlikely to be in the running for an Olympic gold medal in patience. It may not be a particularly normal or sensible solution, but Lily thought as ideas went it was at the very least worth trying.

“We can see,” Severus accepted, “Should we go make the most of the good weather?”

The idea being a sensible one allowing them to make the most of the sunlight, they traipsed out to explore and possibly read by the lake. It may not have been the most social thing for them to have done, but given that none of their housemates were lining up to spend time with them, they chose to familiarise themselves with both the castle and the surrounding culture as best they could. 

Term continued that way, as the weather grew colder and the nights longer. Once a week Severus would sneak into the girls’ shower, carefully orchestrated to a time when the dormitory was empty and the Common Room quiet. It helped that virtually no one in the House seemed at all interested in either him or Lily, choosing to ignore their existence for the most part. It wasn’t exactly friendly, but in that respect at least it was a major advantage. Being ignored was at the very least preferable to being singled out for harassment. As winter’s frozen fingers tightened their grip on the castle, the other Slytherins took to spending more time in the Common Room, complicating matters, but the lack of interest shown to them proved to be a form of invisibility.

The first year Gryffindor boys had proclaimed themselves to be the Marauders to anyone who would listen, as well as the vast majority of the castle who didn’t actually want to listen, a band of brothers who would bravely adventure their way through school and rid the world of evil. Lily got the impression that they had decided to start with her and Severus, which she felt was unfair. She didn’t personally think that either her or Severus was evil as such. A bit naughty according to Petunia, who had always been an unbearable little goody-two-shoes, but Lily thought they were ultimately decent people. Even their more naughty moments were acts of creative academic investigation, that had been sadly misunderstood by the adults in their lives.

Their classmates, of all Houses, couldn’t detract from their enjoyment of their classes though. While they had both concluded that their Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher was providing a walking, talking demonstration of the word ‘useless’ in addition to the world’s most comprehensive guide on how not to teach, they had managed to find a wide range of books to study from in the library. The librarian, despite being stern and faintly terrifying, didn’t appear to care about anyone as long as they were quiet and treated her books with the proper level of respect. She clearly ranked books as far more important than children. As the Marauders appeared to be clinically incapable of being quiet, they rarely entered the library, which suited Lily and Severus just fine. It meant that they could relax and concentrate on the joys of learning magic.

Their system of sharing books was working relatively well too, though it was almost certainly the most inefficient way of reading they could have chosen, with the possible exception of reading aloud together balanced on their heads. They had tried that once, before they had started Hogwarts, and it had ended with Severus falling in the river and Lily losing her shoe, so they were in no hurry to repeat it. They had found it to be relatively fun, but Lily’s mother had been distinctly unimpressed when Lily had returned home with a dripping wet boy and only one shoe. Their method was however a pleasant experience, though any time either of them read anything interesting or exciting they had to impatiently wait for the other to finish what they were reading, swap books and wait for them to catch up. As a consequence Lily had lightly hit Severus with the novel a number of times in frustrated impatience, which hadn’t made him read any faster, and he’d poked her in the face with her own plait, which had also not made her read any faster. 

_Charlotte Sometimes_ gave way to _Tom’s Midnight Garden_ as they slowly made their way through _Hogwarts: A History_. They had both fiddled with their beds to see if there was any way they could magically transport them through time, but had both concluded that it was unlikely, and sworn that they’d always always always be best friends with each other. In comparison to the novels, _Hogwarts: A History_ was not only considerably thicker but also the subject matter was difficult and often required some thinking. It was probably also more useful for their education, but reading something else was still fun. As it was, the excitement of learning magic meant that they were gleefully studying more than they needed for all their classes, eager to learn as much as was possible, impatient to be able to do all the spells they saw the older years casually perform, let alone the understated power present in most of their teachers. 

Aside from the library, they had carved out a den for themselves in the Slytherin Common Room where they were left in peace to read or talk quietly amongst themselves. It wasn’t exactly something they had set out to do intentionally, but as both of them had been enchanted by the views out of the windows into the murky green waters of the lake, they had automatically gravitated to wherever they could look out them. This, combined with the gradual realisation that their company was, for the most part, not particularly welcome, had lead to them skulking in the corners by the windows. Neither of them particularly minded the floor, so they had simply taken to sitting in a nice, cosy corner by the windows, and no one had objected when they surreptitiously dragged a rug into it. At least they had each other, and the beautiful enchantment of magic, which nothing could ever take away from them.


	6. Chapter 6

The nights grew long and dark, and the weather turned colder and gloomier. The castle and Common Room were surprisingly cozy, which was probably connected to magic in some way. The more the nights drew in and the less hospitable the weather grew, the busier the Common Room became, making Severus’s weekly shower even more complicated and approximate. As December approached, Lily found herself looking forward to going home for Christmas. It was the longest she had ever been away from home, and while Hogwarts was amazing she did rather miss her family. Maybe Petunia would have come to her senses after her absence, and they would be able to finally make up. Severus was not looking forward to Christmas, though he didn’t say so to Lily in as many words. He was not going home for Christmas, partially because he hated his home. He wished that Lily was staying at Hogwarts with him, but her enthusiasm at the prospect at seeing her parents made it hard for him to say so. Maybe if he had a nice warm loving family to go home to he might have felt similarly, but as it was he had felt infinitely happier at Hogwarts than he ever had at Spinner’s End.

He waved her goodbye on the station platform, marvelling at how quickly time had flown by. It seemed like only yesterday that they had arrived, small children in a big crowd, on that very same platform. Once she was gone, he felt the smile fall from his face, a lonely leaden feeling replacing it as he trudged back to the Common Room to curl up alone in the corner he had until then shared with Lily. Now his only companions were books, and even they seemed somehow less interesting without a friend to share his excitement with. 

Too late he’d realised that Slytherins were unpopular outsiders in the school, and that those with muggle blood were unwanted in Slytherin. But he couldn’t find himself wanting to be anywhere other than Slytherin, it was still the House that suited him best despite everything. He couldn’t begrudge Lily anything, even if it meant he had lost the chance to be accepted by the rest of the House. It wasn’t fair, just as his life had never been fair. If she hadn’t been there, then maybe he could have played up the fact that his mother was a witch and hidden his father as much as possible. He liked to pretend his father didn’t exist, so it would have been little struggle to erase him from any narrative he told. But with Lily there was no choice, the truth was clear even without him saying a word. Maybe he could have denied it all, claimed his magical birthright, but to do so would have necessitated abandoning her, his first and only friend. His best friend. Nothing could ever persuade him to do that, of that he was certain.

In many ways, it was nothing new. Christmas was always a miserable time of the year for him. His parents always agued more, and so he would slip away outside to escape. At Christmas it was colder, and strangers were more likely to ask a little boy playing alone where his family or friends were, which Severus hated. Lily spent Christmas with her family, and had tried to describe the warmth and food to him, but he had failed to really understand it. The entire concept seemed too foreign, like something out of a surreal dream. The cramped house on Spinner’s Lane was no warmer than the cold outside, and the food was as scarce as it always had been. Lily had tried to compare it to magic, but that hadn’t made sense to Severus. Magic was clearly real, so he could understand it. The things she was trying to explain were too abstract, every detail the exact opposite of everything Severus had ever experienced. The only thing she had managed to make him understand was mince pies, but that was mainly because she had given him a slightly crushed one the previous Christmas and Severus had agreed that it was glorious.

Maybe he would get to experience at least a hint of it at Hogwarts. The family aspect was hopeless, he had long since given up on that, but Hogwarts was considerably warmer than the house at Spinner’s End at least. He would have liked to spend a Christmas with Lily, but just because he hated his home did not mean she did. He knew that if his attitude to Cokeworth and his father had been different, he might have felt the same as her. As it was, despite the fact that the entire school with the exception of Lily appeared to dislike him, he still felt more at home in the castle than he ever had before. The only place that had ever compared was the large sewage pipe that ran over the river, where he and Lily had spent many afternoons sitting and talking, isolated away from the rest of the world. They hadn’t really considered initially what pipe it was, as it was tightly sealed and so there were no hints, but they had both concluded that sewage was most likely. It was either that or some kind of industrial waste. Either way, Severus thought that it really provided a neat summary of his life. He rather wished it didn’t.

The food at Hogwarts was also amazing. Since meeting Lily, Severus had become vaguely aware that his exposure to food had been extremely limited. Mostly he ate whatever he could scrape together from the cupboards in the kitchen and, once he’d grown old enough, whatever he could pick from the bushes. Sometimes his mother cooked, but that was relatively rare. Now that he’d actually tasted real food, his childhood seemed so lacking in flavour. His mother only really made one dish, with slight variations, and regardless of the fact that Lily would often share her food with him, that was still a limited selection that normally consisted of sandwiches.

Avery had gone home for Christmas, like most of the students, leaving Severus with Mulciber. In many ways, he rather wished that it was the other way round. Avery had seemed faintly terrified at the prospect of going home, but he seemed to be afraid of everything as far as Severus could tell. Mulciber he suspected deserved the fear reaction, though thus far nothing more than words had been exchanged. Severus suspected that he, like most of the purebloods, was perfectly capable of curses not necessarily taught to first years. He didn’t particularly want to test that hypothesis. He avoided both of the boys as much as possible. Lily’s company was infinitely superior anyway.

Now, however, even Hogwarts: A History had lost some of its shine. Somehow it just seemed to be duller, harder and less captivating without Lily to share with. He felt like each paragraph dragged on, and it didn’t penetrate his brain properly. He also missed swapping over to read fiction, getting lost in made-up realities. The little corner of the Common Room that had felt quite cozy as they read, fish swimming tantalisingly close, now seemed a bit lonely, as if he was an outcast. All alone, unwanted, relegated to the floor.

He was also aware that he would undoubtedly have to face the prospect of washing in the cold water of the toilet taps, though he was also seriously considering just not washing until Lily returned. He hadn’t realised quite how nice warm water was, but now that he did he was deeply reluctant to use cold water. The Scottish winter did not make him particularly willing to remove his robes at all, let alone to splash on freezing cold water. Using the girls’ shower would be, he suspected, more difficult without Lily. He felt it was best not to try. 

All in all, he missed Lily.

In many ways it was just like being back at Cokeworth, before they had become friends. Hogwarts was still a far more fascinating place, but he also had to cling harder to his resolve. Here he was once again alone and excluded. He reminded himself that it was just because he was different, and that being different made him special, just like he’d always reassured himself as a child. Just like he’d tried to explain to Lily, though she’d thought he was just being mean to Petunia. He had thought that at Hogwarts he would be normal, but he wasn’t. But neither was Lily. When he had moments of wondering whether being muggle raised and having muggle blood really did make their difference a good and special thing, he reminded himself that to consider it a bad thing would tar Lily with the same brush. It was the first time he’d ever encountered the idea that anyone might dislike or look down on her, so the only logical conclusion was that they were all wrong. So in Hogwarts too they were different, a special difference that other people couldn’t always appreciate. Severus was starting to suspect that much like muggles, most magical people were idiots.

When it came time for the Christmas dinner, the Great Hall had been redecorated in all sorts of festive ways. There was a giant tree, with tinsel and baubles in all four House colours. At the very top there was a large star that looked almost too big for the tree, which glowed in each House colour in turn. Severus watched it change from red to blue to green to yellow and then back to red. Paper streamers covered the walls with intricate and gaudy patterns. Large snowflakes, shining brilliant white, glittered around the room. Some even hung in the air amongst the candles that floated around the room as usual. It was breathtakingly beautiful but sadly lost on Severus who thought it was probably unnecessary. He imagined that Lily would appreciate the entire scene more than him, which made it quite a shame that it was her who was missing it.

Lucius sat down, not beside him but opposite, giving him a look that Severus had until then generally only seen directed at dog shit. He felt that was faintly unfair. He might be a little unkempt but he was at least a whole level above dog shit. He definitely smelt better, or at least he hoped so. He also suspected that someone like Lucius had never encountered dog shit. Somehow it seemed too plebeian for him to have ever existed in the same space of. Lucius was one of those people whose lives Severus simply couldn’t quite imagine, it seemed so far removed from his own. Severus assumed the only real reason that Lucius had deigned to sit down near him was because the vast majority of the upper years had all gone home for Christmas and it might have looked bad to leave Severus sitting all alone on Christmas Day. Severus would have been quite happy being left alone, he had even brought along one of his textbooks that he needed to read for his holiday homework. He was actually quite proud of the fact that he had thus far gone an entire week without speaking to a single person, but he hadn’t been able to tell anyone of this achievement as the only person who he felt would be suitably impressed was in Cokeworth, and also talking to people would have ruined his streak. 

“Merry Christmas,” Lucius said, in a tone of voice that almost suggested that he considered Christmas to have been invented as a personal insult towards himself. Judging by the look on his face, he was also distinctly unimpressed with the decor.

“Merry Christmas,” Severus replied, because he did have some manners no matter what anyone said. He hadn’t ever asked to check for certain, but he didn’t think he’d been born in a barn. He wasn’t even certain if he’d ever actually seen a barn.

“You’re looking particularly unkempt,” Lucius continued distastefully, as if Severus had spent the last few hours rolling around in manure for the sole purpose of annoying him. Lucius tended to have a faintly dismissive attitude towards most people, and had very strict ideas about propriety, so Severus didn’t take it as particularly insulting. He regularly told Lily and Severus off for not brushing their hair properly. Severus had never before been aware that hair brushing was a thing, and had consequently had to borrow Lily’s hair brush to do so. Lily hated brushing her hair with a passion that impressed Severus, and was only too glad to leave her hair brush in Severus’s possession for as much as it was possible. 

“Sorry,” Severus said, though without much sincerity. He wasn’t particularly sorry at all. He refrained from giving himself a casual sniff to check for smell, as that was slightly uncouth, but his well-mannered restraint was entirely missed by Lucius, who continued to regard him like a hairball coughed up by a cat onto an expensive rug.

“School holiday means no class, it doesn’t mean you are allowed to behave like some kind of unwashed animal or commoner,” Lucius said, “Despite your slightly unsavoury background, you and the carrot girl have managed to look almost civilised. That is important for House pride, so I expect you to clean yourself up tonight. I will be watching,”

Severus was glad Lily was not there to overhear herself referred to as carrot girl. He also did not appreciate the mental image of Lucius watching him like a hawk. Christmas, he had always been led to believe, was supposed to be about happiness and presents, not overbearing prefects supervising showering. He would have to use all of his cunning to get out of it. While he had a limited idea of what exactly would constitute an ideal Christmas, he was pretty confident that having Lucius watch him wash was very far down the list. 

He accepted being considered to be an unwashed commoner, though he did feel that lumping them in with animals was slightly harsh. He wondered vaguely, as he had begun to do since arriving at Hogwarts, what his mother’s family had been like. He knew they had been magical, but now he wondered whether they might also have been high class like so many of the other purebloods he had met. Logically, he assumed not all purebloods were members of the aristocracy, but there did seem to be some kind of correlation. It would explain a lot about his childhood, as well as being entirely unhelpful for his current situation. 

He enjoyed the roast potatoes, while Lucius made a sneering comment about how incredibly plebeian the variety of potatoes used was. Severus hadn’t been aware that potatoes had varieties, so he chose to not add his opinion. He thought they tasted good, but he also got the impression from the slightly horrified expression on Lucius’s face that smothering them in vast quantities of salt and malt vinegar was not the most respectable way to consume them. It was either that or Lucius had something against malt vinegar, which seemed just as likely. Lucius seemed like he was hard to impress. As far as Severus could tell, the only thing Lucius was actually impressed with in the entire world was Narcissa. In comparison, everything else was treated rather like primordial slime.

“So, how is class?” Lucius asked, having entirely failed to get the memo about Christmas spirit.

“…Good,” Severus replied, uncertain of how much detail Lucius wanted. Apparently, that was satisfactory, as Lucius probed no more. Severus ate his Christmas meal cautiously, feeling rather like an amoeba under a microscope. He suspected he would have enjoyed it more without Lucius’s commentary, provided occasionally and without any apparent need for a response from Severus. Severus was just content to eat food, the fact that it tasted good was still a benefit he was happily adjusting to. He suspected that Lucius had never eaten mouldy bread, or he might have been more impressed with the duck. Lucius thought it was overdone and dry. Severus would have happily eaten it every day for the rest of the year.

Severus’s cunning plan for avoiding Lucius once they’d returned to the Common Room failed for multiple reasons. The plan itself centred around slinking away quietly into a corner while Lucius was distracted, but left no wiggle room for what to do if Lucius was not distracted. As the major force for distracting Lucius was Narcissa, who had gone home for Christmas, he kept his focus on Severus. Most of the upper years had gone home, so they also failed to provide any kind of a distraction. This meant that Severus’s attempt at slinking away surreptitiously was noticed and he found himself sitting glumly on the floor in his usual corner with Lucius standing over him, hands on hips and a distinctly unimpressed look on his face.

“Is this your idea of washing?” Lucius asked. Severus was sorely tempted to say yes, but he didn’t imagine it would go down particularly well, so he wisely kept his silence.

“What is wrong with the shower?” Lucius said, in a tone that suggested as prefect he was used to all sorts of problems, all of which he found to be annoying and beneath him. Severus also got the impression that his lack of an answer was irritating Lucius, but it was not enough to make him actually provide an answer immediately. The silence stretched on, Severus glancing hopefully at the fish in the lake despite there being little chance of them providing any help. Lucius tapped his foot impatiently, clearly not used to being disobeyed. Severus rather wished he wasn’t sitting down, as it meant Lucius loomed over him in a manner that made him feel even smaller than he really was.

“Mulciber said the shower is for purebloods only,” Severus muttered eventually, wondering if that would be enough to make Lucius leave him alone. Lucius glared at him, as if everything in the world was Severus’s fault. Severus supposed in some ways it was, as he seemed to be in the wrong just through having been born. It wasn’t a particularly nice feeling. 

“There’s no such rule, and Mulciber’s an idiot,” Lucius said, before pausing. He looked at Severus with a curious expression, not dissimilar to a scientist discovering an exotic new kind of bacteria. 

“Wait, how have you been washing until now?” he asked, a look of genuine interest on his face. Severus glanced at the unhelpful fish, before looking back up at Lucius. It didn’t seem likely that he’d leave. If anything, he was leaning casually against the back of a sofa, neatly blocking Severus’s route out of the corner and looking perfectly settled. Lucius tended to look perfect in virtually everything he ever did. Severus imagined it must take a lot of effort, though he was also leaving the possibility that it was some kind of magical ability open for the time being. He was always the first out of all the prefects to tell the younger years off for looking too scruffy or whenever their robes were in any way crooked. Both Lily and Severus appreciated that he was relatively fair in his obsession with the entire House looking as presentable as was physically possible, though Severus couldn’t magically make his second hand robes new. At least, not as a first year. He was hopeful that spells like that might come later in the syllabus. Not all the prefects or teachers were quite as fair in their corrections. At the same time, both Lily and Severus hated being made to rearrange their robes or brush their hair when they failed to live up to Lucius’s extremely high standards. They both felt there were far more interesting things in life to do than make sure they always looked immaculate. 

“Lily’s been letting me use the girls’ shower,” Severus answered reluctantly. He didn’t feel that it was an answer that would go down particularly well.

Lucius stared at him for a few moments, as Severus carefully avoided his gaze. Then, he started laughing. Severus looked at him in surprise, unused to such a reaction. Still laughing, Lucius crouched down to bring himself to Severus’s eye level. This was actually more intimidating for Severus, but Lucius seemed entirely unaware of that.

“Of course,” Lucius chuckled, “You just used the girls’ shower. Obviously,”

Severus looked at him worriedly, eyes wide. Laughter wasn’t always a good sign. People coming near, especially when looming above him, also tended to be a bad sign in his experience. His father sometimes laughed at the things he or his mother said, seemingly to be amused before he started yelling and hitting. Severus had learnt not to let smiles or laughter lull him into a false sense of security.

“You’re interesting, you and Evans,” Lucius continued, still smiling, “I think I’m going to enjoy the next couple of years. You two should provide plenty of entertainment. I’m just going to have to talk to you regularly,”

Severus wasn’t entirely convinced that this wasn’t some kind of threat. He also wasn’t entirely sure how he felt about being regarded as some form of entertainment, existing for Lucius’s benefit.

Lucius sighed, shaking his head with an amused smile, “You can’t continue using the girls’ shower until you graduate. After fourth year boys can’t enter the girls’ dormitories unless they’re a prefect, and even then it’s only for prefect related duties. You probably won’t be a prefect, let’s be honest here, and anyway showering doesn’t count,”

“Oh,” Severus said in a small voice. He hadn’t even considered anything as far ahead as being a prefect, but still being so casually dismissed hurt slightly. He supposed he could understand that it was unlikely. Neither he nor Lily had given the showers much forethought either, simply living in the moment as eleven year olds are wont to do.

“While he’s at school Mulciber shouldn’t let his family traditions get in the way of the honour of the House,” Lucius muttered, clearly not actually offended by Mulciber’s stance but more that it might possibly reflect badly on Slytherin.

“Go shower now. I expect you out of the boys’ shower, dried and dressed, properly clean, within ten minutes,” Lucius said sharply to Severus, in a way that made it quite clear that he didn’t have a choice.

Severus knew an ultimatum when he heard one. He got them a lot from his parents. He found the best way of compromising was to do whatever the person who was currently the most frightening wanted, though there was also a certain amount of consideration required for who he liked the most. As a rule, he liked his mother more than his father, but his father was more scary. He knew that obeying Lucius ran the risk of annoying Mulciber, and in many ways that was something he wished to avoid as he slept in the same room as him. On the other hand, he liked Lucius more, though he had to admit that that was possibly just because he knew him less than Mulciber, who he had class with. Lucius also seemed to be more highly regarded in the House than Mulciber, though that might be an issue connected to age. It was entirely likely that once Lucius graduated in a couple of years the power dynamics in the House would shift.

With a certain degree of reluctance, Severus scrambled to his feet to obey the orders, heading off to the boys’ shower in the hopes that Mulciber was elsewhere. He was not impressed with Christmas.


	7. Chapter 7

Severus was quite glad when the Christmas holiday drew to a close and the train returned, bringing the students who had gone home for the holiday back. He was looking forward to seeing Lily again, and also to Narcissa’s return. He had little interest in Narcissa herself, per se, but rather was hoping for her presence to distract Lucius. Part of the reason that Lucius had proceeded to spend the remainder of the holiday treating Severus as his own personal form of entertainment was presumably because there were so very few of the upper years left at the school, though Severus suspected that Narcissa really was the one who made all the difference. She did form a major part of Lucius’s preferred conversation topics, though luckily for Severus he didn’t seem to require much input, so Severus mostly just nodded as he talked.

Severus hadn’t really minded much. As far as he could tell he had nothing in common with Lucius, except them both being in Slytherin, but Lucius didn’t seem to mind. If anything, he seemed to find it to be endearing. Severus wasn’t entirely pleased at being treated like a strange form of sentiment slime, but it was absolutely worth it for the look on Mulicber’s face the first time he had noticed the two of them sitting together. Severus was confident that Mulciber still didn’t particularly like him, but more than that he clearly respected Lucius, which overruled personal feelings.

He’d spent his childhood before meeting Lily primarily alone, but he had realised he had become accustomed to her presence. Two weeks was the longest they had gone without seeing each other, as far as he could remember. Lucius provided some form of company, which Severus was grateful for as well as confused by. He had not previously thought that he would ever need company, with the possible exception of a reluctant admission that he liked spending time with Lily. The idea that he might have been lonely in the castle full of people struck him as strange, and wasn’t really something he wanted to think about too much.

Severus was sitting on the floor in the corner reading when the returning students started pouring into the Common Room. Lucius had been, in Severus’s opinion, really quite soppy all day about his reunion with Narcissa and had spent an inordinate amount of time primping and preening himself in preparation. Severus had been looking forward to his reunion with Lily, but judging by Lucius he could only hope that he would never fall in love. It looked unpleasant and exhausting. 

It hadn’t occurred to either of them to write to each other, as they’d always had a friendship so based in seeing each other regularly. It was only when Lucius had mentioned writing poetry to Narcissa that Severus wondered whether may he should have written something to Lily, but he had no idea what, except probably not verses dedicated to how lovely her hair was. He’d tell her how things had been once they met again, and he thought poetry was pushing it a bit. Going by the fact that Lily had sent him nothing, he assumed Lily felt the same way.

He didn’t notice her the moment when she entered the Common Room, but she knew where he would be regardless. He noticed her the moment she was right in front of him, the moment before she flung her arms round him in a desperate hug as if she’d spent the last twenty years exiled from the kingdom for a crime she hadn’t committed and had finally been found innocent and thus reunited with the one person who had always believed in her. Severus blamed Lily’s taste in fantasy for the analogy. She squeezed him uncomfortably tight, and Severus was grateful he had noticed her in time to drop Lily’s copy of _Red Moon, Black Mountain_ he had been holding in his hands. She’d read it already, so she’d left it with him over the holidays.

Severus hugged her back, though less violently. He was happy to see her again, though unlike her he chose not to express it in a way that suggested he wanted to break her ribs. If it had been anyone else Severus would have objected, though realistically he would have fled long before they managed to get their arms around him. With Lily however it was different, so he just put up with not being able to breathe for a brief duration. She sniffled noisily in his ear, leaning on him uncomfortably due to her having launched herself at him from standing, meaning that she was partially on top of his crossed legs. He couldn’t imagine that she was comfortable either.

When she did finally draw back, the sniffles were confirmed to being accompanied by tears. Severus watched her worriedly with large, anxious eyes. She wiped her nose on the sleeve of her robe, a smear that was unfortunately visible on the black fabric. Luckily no adults or prefects were watching to notice this lapse in manners, and Severus obviously didn’t care whether she used a handkerchief or not. His concern was more than she seemed to be upset. He wasn’t very good at emotions, but he did care about Lily’s.

Without a word she snuggled into the corner beside him, still sniffling slightly but to Severus’s relief not actually crying. Long red hair spilled over his shoulder and she seemed keen to be as close to him as physically possible. He moved in slightly closer, so they were leaning against each other lightly.

“I missed you,” Lily whispered between sniffles.

“I missed you too,” Severus replied, the book forgotten. For a moment they sat in silence, the lake quiet beyond the window, the background hum of the Common Room full of happy reunions. 

“Next year I’m staying for Christmas,” she continued, not looking at him, but resting her head on his shoulder with a sigh.

Severus rested his head against hers, waiting for the words he knew would follow. They sat in silence again, a comfortable moment apart from the rest of the world, a brief oasis when they could have been the only people in existence. Then Lily sighed again and shifted, moving slightly away from Severus. He missed the sensation of warmth and care their closeness had provided, but she didn’t go far, merely adjusting so that their eyes could meet.

“Petunia was awful,” Lily said sadly. Severus had always considered awful to be the best possible word to describe Petunia in general, but he had been trying not to be rude about her to Lily. As he had no reason to talk to anyone else about Lily’s sister, this had meant he hadn’t mentioned Petunia for months. He also hadn’t thought of her for months. As far as he was concerned, he was happy for their relationship to stay at that level of total disinterest. She had been a constant thorn in their sides while they had lived in Cokeworth, approving of exactly nothing they ever did or indeed Severus in general. At Hogwarts her dislike and steadfast belief in propriety seemed like it had belonged to another lifetime. 

“She told me,” Lily paused to sniffle a bit before continuing, “She told me she told the kids at her school that the reason I wasn’t at the same secondary school was because I’d gone to some special boarding school for insane criminals, and there’s nothing I can do,”

“Oh…” Severus said, unsure of how to respond. He didn’t particularly care what the muggle children of Cokeworth thought, but he realised that much like the way Lily cared about her sister despite all logic suggesting she should stop, Lily cared about these other nameless children who she would probably never meet again anyway. He hesitated as she sniffled glumly, trying to think of something that he could say that might help. While he thought insults were probably appropriate, he was aware that they would probably just upset Lily more.

“What did you tell them?” he asked curiously, wondering. He knew that she had had vague friends at her primary school, children she talked to and played with in break time, even if she always reassured him that he was her best friend and subsequently spent all her time outside of school playing with him. 

Lily sighed again, looking miserable, “Nothing,” she answered, “Nothing because we broke up for summer before I got the Hogwarts letter, and it’s not that I didn’t trust you but I didn’t know what to say and also it’s not like I can tell them about magic so I just said nothing, it wasn’t like I was super close to any of them as you were my best friend and I didn’t need to tell you anything,”

Severus was slightly hurt at her admission, but he accepted that she had a point. Hogwarts letters did arrive after they left primary school permanently, and it wasn’t like they could tell their classmates that they were going to a magical boarding school. His mother had been very clear about not telling muggles anything about magic ever or he would be taken away to Azkaban by the Dementors. He had been delighted to find Lily, as she clearly had magic which meant by that logic he could talk to her and risk accidental magic as she was in the same boat as him. In many ways it was lucky that they had met and that their personalities had been so compatible.

“What did you tell your classmates?” Lily asked, suddenly curious, the question distracting her from her misery for a moment. Severus winced slightly, hesitating. They had gone to different primary schools, but both primary schools fed into the same secondary school so their respective classmates stood a chance of having met each other. Lily had got on with everyone relatively well, though as she had spent all her time outside of school with Severus she had not been particularly close friends with any of the other children in her year. Severus had avoided socialising with all the people at his school as much as was physically possible. Only one person had dared to asked him about his future secondary school.

“I… might have told one of them that I planned to run away to join the circus…” he admitted reluctantly, aware that it was probably not the kind of answer that, when combined with Petunia’s claim, would help him or Lily seem normal to the muggles of Cokeworth.

Lily stared at him for a few moments. He chewed at his lip, giving her an almost apologetic look. Then she started laughing, though there was a slightly despairing tone to it, as if she was torn between being amused at his answer and resigning herself to being considered some kind of insane criminal by the general public.

“Why?” she asked, giving him a quizzical look as if he were a strange creature only recently discovered. She had felt that way when they first met, that he was so exotic and different from anything else in Cokeworth, even his name exuding something beyond the normal dull day-to-day existence of most people. 

“I didn’t want to have a conversation with him,” Severus said, wrinkling his nose, “I just wanted to be left alone and it’s not like I could tell him about Hogwarts. Besides, running away to join the circus explains being absent from Spinner’s End as well as not being at the same school as him so I thought two birds one stone,”

Lily accepted that his explanation made sense, from a certain point of view. She wasn’t convinced that it was the most helpful thing he could have said, though really it was Petunia who was intentionally spreading malicious rumours about them around the town. Severus might have just accidentally contributed to her lies by his desperate dislike of small talk. She sighed.

“It’s fine,” Severus said after a while, demonstrating an entirely new definition of the word fine from the one Lily had been using up until that moment, “We don’t belong there and that’s fine. Cokeworth isn’t that great anyway. We belong here, surrounded by magic,”

Lily looked despondently at the fish lurking in the murky water. They looked back, blankly and without much intelligence. She peered out at the Common Room, filled to the brim with fellow Slytherins reconnecting after the holidays, all seemingly sharing so much. She looked at Severus for a moment then back to general scene of the Common Room. Her face hardened and she met his eyes.

“We do belong here,” she said with a determination that surprised him, “We’ve got magic and it’s just as good as anyone else’s,”

He smiled, an unusual sight that few people aside from Lily ever got to see. The smile was wide enough for his slightly crooked lower left canine to slip out, the only tooth visible. It wasn’t the prettiest smile, but Lily liked it anyway. It had personality, like Severus.

“We do,” he agreed, drawing strength from their shared determination, “We do. We belong at Hogwarts and we belong in Slytherin. The Hat put us here and we have as much right as anyone else to be here. If they don’t like it then that’s their problem,”

Lily screwed up her face slightly at that before nodding her agreement, “Yeah, and if anyone doesn’t like us because we’re different or Slytherin or whatever, then we’ll just keep being us until they get used to it,”

She sighed again, despondency and determination intertwining. For a while they sat in quiet, individual contemplation, before Lily spoke up again, suddenly reminded, “Oh, how was your Christmas? Was it alright here?”

Severus chewed his lip thoughtfully, frowning slightly, “I think so,” he said, “There was a feast,”

Lily looked at him hopefully, before realising that he had nothing more to say. She scrunched up her face at him, trying to think of any questions to ask that might provide more of an answer. 

“Did you make any friends?” Lily asked hopefully, kindhearted enough that she didn’t want him to have been alone over the holiday. Even if her time home had been disappointing enough that she had found herself wishing that Severus was just down the road for her to go and hide away with, she could understand that he definitely did not want to spend anymore time on Spinner’s End than he absolutely had to. 

Severus frowned again, as if it was a difficult question, which it really shouldn’t have been no matter how limited his experience with friendship might have been.

“Maybe,” he said, uncertainly, “I think so,”

He moved so he could lean round the edge of a sofa that hid them from the Common Room at large. Lily followed his movements, also peering out. He gestured with a cautious nod of his head towards Lucius, who was clearly enjoying his reunion with Narcissa. Lily nodded thoughtfully, unsure how to feel about this piece of news. They shared a shrug. Severus wasn’t convinced Lucius’s interest would last now that he had Narcissa to fawn over. Lily wasn’t convinced Lucius wasn’t doing everything as part of some complicated scheme for personal glory. 

As she looked back at Severus, her eyes fell on _Red Moon, Black Mountain_ , abandoned in favour of her company. She stood up abruptly, startling Severus slightly. His eyes followed her upwards, blinking in surprised confusion.

“I just remembered!” she exclaimed, a delighted expression wiping away all the uncertainty of a few moments ago. Leaving Severus where he was she dashed up to her dormitory bed, where she knew her trunk would be waiting for her. That was one of the many truly amazing things about magic. She and her father had had to lug her trunk from train to car to house and then back again for her trip home for the holiday, but the Hogwarts leg was all dealt with by some magical means she had yet to figure out. She wondered if it would be mentioned in _Hogwarts: A History_ , but also wondered if maybe it was just too obvious to the purebloods to be worth more than a casual footnote at best. There appeared to be a lot of things that seemed to fall under the category of common knowledge for the other students that Lily and Severus had never before encountered, though she also wondered if growing up with magic made people less likely to ask questions when the answer would always just be magic. 

Severus waited, as there was nothing else for him to do, so he sat where he had been left feeling ever so slightly abandoned. Lily didn’t take long however, returning quickly in a flurry of black robes and slightly too long red hair. With a massive smile, she dumped an impressive pile of books beside him as she dropped back down to sit on the floor beside him.

“Books!” she said proudly and redundantly, “For us to read!”

Severus looked at them, taking in the number and thickness of them. There were about ten books, all of them considerably thicker than the novels they had read the previous term, though obviously nowhere near as thick as _Hogwarts: A History_. He picked up the book on the top of the stack, _Swallows and Amazons_ , aware that Lily was practically vibrating with excitement and anticipation, turning it to read the blurb.

“It’s a whole series,” Lily said, radiating enthusiasm, “Of muggles doing muggle things. I thought it would be good, you know. Learning about magic and reading about muggle stuff. I did a lot of thinking, because of Petunia you see, and I’m a muggle-born witch so I should know both worlds, right?”

Severus nodded, feeling that in many ways it didn’t matter how he felt. It was impossible to say no to that level of delighted anticipation. Besides, he like her had noticed that there was a seeming lack of fiction in the Hogwarts library. They had’t ruled out the possibility that it was because it was a school library and thus geared towards learning, but they had also not been able to observe any other children reading fiction for fun. It may have been because they weren’t really friends as such with anyone else in the school, so had no opportunity for conversations or observations that might have netted that kind of discovery, but they were also keeping open the possibility that the wizarding world was not particularly interested in made up stories. Given that there was magic, they could rather understand the reasoning. 

“It’ll take us a while,” he said, flicking through the book in his hand and taking the entire collection into consideration, “We’ll have to find some other books on magic to read from the library for after _Hogwarts: A History_ ,”

“It’ll be brilliant,” Lily sighed, hopefully, “We can learn everything just as well as everyone else but not be like them, like having our own secret society full of things no one else understands but it’s just because it’s muggle stuff that they know nothing about!”

“Yeah,” Severus said, feeling more enthusiastic when she put it that way, “Our own little special world that no one else can understand. We can learn all about their magical ways through class and the library, but they’ll have no way of knowing all the things we think are so obvious…”

There was a poetic justice, excluding the world that had already expressed an interest in excluding them. He liked the idea of them having things they could understand and talk about that to the others in Slytherin would be like a foreign language. Maybe they would be looked down on for holding on to the remnants of their muggle-raised past, but they would be together just like they had been together at Cokeworth, only now rather than sharing their excitement about magic and a future at Hogwarts they would be sharing muggle culture and a shared history of the tatty old streets of Cokeworth.

“You should maybe keep them safe in your trunk though,” he suggested sensibly, having little trust left towards the world in general. Lily looked at him in surprise for a moment, then nodded her agreement. She gathered the pile up, her arms precariously full of books, and scurried off back to her dormitory.

Severus was finishing off the last few paragraphs of _Red Moon, Black Mountain_ when she returned, so he didn’t notice her approach. He noticed her arrival, however, as she dropped a whole armful of socks on top of him, which startled him somewhat. He looked up at her in confusion as she beamed at him with a very self-satisfied expression on her face. He looked in confusion at the collection of girls’ socks surrounding him, a few having landed in his lap and on top of his book. Lily flopped down beside him, still grinning like she knew a fantastic joke he didn’t.

“What…?” he asked. There really wasn’t anything else for him to say.

“I stole them from Petunia,” Lily laughed, “Because she was so obnoxious. Merry Christmas, bit late but have a whole load of socks!”

Severus looked again at the collection of remarkably frilly socks, “Thanks…? I didn’t get you anything…”

“That’s fine, I didn’t really get you anything,” Lily grinned, gathering the socks up so they were less disastrously scattered, “Take any you want. I was just so annoyed at Petunia for being so awful all Christmas, even though I’d been looking forward to seeing her, so I sort of took her socks…”

“Won’t she notice…?” Severus asked, amused. He considered mentioning that stealing her sister’s socks as a form of petty revenge would probably just fuel Petunia’s attempts to tell everyone in Cokeworth that Lily was going to a school for criminals, but he didn’t want to. He rather liked the mental image of Petunia opening her sock drawer to find it empty. He had never liked her, and having cold feet rubbed raw by hard shoes was a fitting punishment as far as he was concerned.

“Not immediately,” Lily said cheerfully, “I thought it through properly, like a good little Slytherin. Initially I was going to take one of every pair of socks, leaving her with a pile of single, odd socks. I know how much she hates odd socks. But, then she would have noticed before I left for Hogwarts, and then mum would have yelled. So I decided to take most of her socks. She’ll think that they’re in the wash or something, it’ll take her ages to realise that most of them have vanished and by that point she probably won’t even guess it was me!”

She looked so proud with herself, Severus couldn’t help but join in laughing in delight. He helped her gather the socks up, and they sat dividing up the spoils of her crime between them, each deciding which socks were best for who. Severus didn’t tell her that second hand stolen girls’ socks was the best present anyone had ever given her, but in some ways he suspected that she could probably guess.


	8. Chapter 8

To Lily’s surprise, once they were back to the usual routine of term time and they entered the Great Hall as they normally did, Lucius waved them over to where he sat with Narcissa, Crabbe and Goyle. Narcissa shot him a look that fully implied that as far as she was concerned he had gone barking mad and had just gestured living excrement over to sit with them. Crabbe and Goyle both seemed awkwardly torn between the two immaculate blondes, as if uncertain which one to agree with. That they were not reacting with explicit disgust to Lily and Severus’s presence was in some ways a compliment, given adequately low standards which Severus admittedly had. The fact that they seemed to be willing to consider that reaction as possibly appropriate offended Lily ever so slightly, though she also was unwilling to say anything to that effect. They were both physically imposing, tall and made of a large amount of muscle.

She shared a slightly awkward look with Severus as they both sat down at the table, feeling like tiny little first years compared to the older Slytherins. The size issue was not helped by the way that Crabbe and Goyle in particular towered over them even when sitting. She imagined either one of them could pick her up in one hand and Severus in the other, to casually toss them across the room should they so wish too. She knew that all four of them could almost certainly do so with magic as well, making her more determined to learn more magic so she could narrow down any size differences. She was still only small, even assuming that she would eventually grow.

For a few moments there was silence, as if no one was sure what to say. Lily and Severus both had no idea what they should say, even with Severus having had a few brief conversations with Lucius over Christmas. Mostly, he had let Lucius take the lead. Narcissa looked like she would be perfectly happy if the ground opened up and swallowed them alive, drawing them screaming in torment, all the way down to the bowels of Hell. As such, she did not seem to be particularly willing to speak to them.

The sensation of being a particularly pungent fungus in a petri dish was not especially conductive to either Lily or Severus’s appetite, but they persevered in helping themselves to some food. Their presence didn’t seem to be putting the older Slytherins off their food either, so they ate in silence, both of them aware of a selection of eyes on them. Not only could they feel that their position was being noted by the Slytherin students, who they had discovered had a tendency towards making mental notes of all sorts of interesting details for later use, but a glance up towards the teacher’s table showed that Dumbledore was giving them a pensive look. Lily wondered if Lucius sitting with her and Severus was a kind of charity that would stand him in good stead, thereby increasing his chances of being Head Boy.

“What class do you have next?” Crabbe asked, breaking the silence and making an effort to engage them in conversation. Narcissa gave him a look that seemed to scream ‘traitor’ but said nothing, merely continuing to cut her boiled egg up into very small pieces with perhaps more force than was strictly speaking necessary.

“Flying,” Severus answered, correctly guessing that the question was directed towards him and Lily. Flying in winter was especially cold, as they were not only outside, but also fully exposed to the elements up in the air. Flying a broomstick did require more physical effort than they had both initially expected, but it was still not enough to create the kind of heat required that either of them were particularly pleased at the idea of flying about in the midst of winter. Madam Hooch had informed all the more reluctant first years that it was character building, but both Severus and Lily felt they were quite content with their characters without any extra cold-induced additions.

“I loved flying,” Goyle broke in, his whole face lighting up. He looked a lot less scary when he smiled. His normal expression seemed to be a scowl, but Lily wondered if that was just the way his face was. The difference between that and the delighted smile was definitely enough of a transformation to make her wonder if he was potentially nice underneath his intimidating appearance. She liked to think the best of people, unlike Severus who generally took the opposite stance. 

“How are you finding it?” Lucius asked. Had Severus been the only one being asked he no doubt would have answered ‘fine’ as that tended to be his set answer to all possible questions. He didn’t particularly like giving information to other people, and disliked being asked anything remotely personal. The only exception was Lily. Lily, however, was more open and willing to give proper answers.

“It’s alright,” she said, “Though broomsticks are a bit disappointing. It’s just so very stereotypical you know, everyone knows witches fly about on broomsticks so we’re looking forward to other types of flying, but mostly unassisted. I can’t wait!”

Above them a few glances were exchanged, and Severus was aware of Lucius sharply and subtly shaking his head, as if signalling something to the others that he didn’t want him or Lily to know.

“How… about Quidditch?” Goyle asked weakly, “Great sport, played on broomsticks, Slytherin looks likely to win the cup this year, what with the team we’ve got…”

“I have no interest in Quidditch,” Lily stated clearly. Of all the many varied magical things she had encountered at Hogwarts, Quidditch came fairly low down the list of things she was interested in. Maybe had it been one of the things Severus had told her about, an endearing detail passed on from his mother, then she might have felt different, but it wasn’t. 

“I like it,” Severus said, “When there’s a match on the library and Common Room are both always empty, so it’s much more peaceful for homework,”

There was a startled silence, rather akin to one that might result had they removed all their clothes and started lathering their naked bodies in tomato ketchup.

“You will die alone and unloved,” Narcissa stated calmly after a minute, giving them a level look with her pale blue eyes, before turning the entirety of her attention to her lunch with a casual finality.

It was by far the most terrifying thing anyone had ever said to Lily, so she stared at her with wide eyes before looking worriedly around the table, eventually shuffling slightly closer to Severus. Severus didn’t think it was a threat, as he was quite familiar with those. His father regularly threatened to beat him and kill him, though thus far only the beating threat had been carried out. He had also regularly informed Severus that when he died he would go to Hell, where the Devil would torment his soul for all of the rest of eternity. His father had also informed him that he was a soulless demon born from an evil succubus, which his mother had neither confirmed nor denied, so he was slightly uncertain whether he had a soul or not. He reckoned he would find out when he died, but it didn’t sound like it would be a nice discovery either way so he was hoping to avoid dying for as long as possible. He thus recognised it as Narcissa merely stating a fact, though he was a little unsure what their miserable deaths had to do with Quidditch.

“Next time Slytherin play,” Lucius said slowly, a hint of amusement running through his tone but not hiding the uncompromising order that his statement clearly was, “You will come and watch. You will cheer on Crabbe and Goyle, they’re our Beaters,”

Severus suspected he would rather have his toenails removed with pliers. He also suspected that saying that might result in him having his toenails removed with magic and still being forced to watch Quidditch. Reluctantly he nodded, Lily doing the same. It might be better than they assumed, for all that it would undoubtably involve watching people fly around in the cold. In many ways, that was worse than actually flying around in the cold, because when they were flying in class they actually knew when the lesson would finish as well as the vague sensation that they were learning something. 

“Quidditch is the most popular sport in the wizarding world,” Crabbe explained. As far as Lily was concerned that didn’t mean she would enjoy it. Football was the most popular sport in the muggle world in many ways, but that didn’t stop Lily from thinking it was overrated.

Goyle rummaged in his bag, an action that almost led to him knocking over his pumpkin juice. Lily and Severus had initially enjoyed how exotic and unavailable in the muggle world pumpkin juice was, but had started to wonder if there were no other flavours in the wizarding world. A significant number of the cakes also seemed to be pumpkin themed, and they had both found that they missed the humble blackcurrant. As far as they could tell, there were no other options of juice flavour. They had even surreptitiously peered at the other tables in the Great Hall to check, and act that had slightly terrified some poor innocent Hufflepuffs.

“Here,” he said, handing over a tattered book that he had clearly read far more than any of his still pristine text books. Severus took it gingerly, and they both read the words _Quidditch Through The Ages_ on the cover. They both shared a slight glance, wondering if they had really been assigned reading material as homework for lunch. They both preferred their actual homework, as they mostly learnt about magic from that.

“Thanks,” Lily said, wondering if she should ask if there would be a test, “We’ll read it,”

“Good,” Lucius said, “If you’re going to live in our world you should at least know some basics,”

Narcissa muttered something that was too quiet for either Lily or Severus to hear properly, but they both caught fragments of phrases regarding the ability to walk on hind legs, so they assumed it was an insult directed towards them. Lucius ignored her, smiling magnanimously at the two first years. Lily and Severus nodded obediently.

“Alright…” Lily accepted, not that she felt that she had a choice. For all his veneer of generosity, upheld by the enthusiasm Crabbe and Goyle obviously felt for Quidditch that allowed them to surpass any potential misgivings, Lucius was not giving them much choice in the matter. It seemed slightly like a kindly act, a show put on for the benefit of others rather than a heartfelt desire to help them, which irked Lily. She disliked insincerity, especially from adults who thought she was too young and therefore too stupid to notice. Severus was happy to be treated kindly by someone in a vague position of authority over him, as that was not an occurrence he was used to.

Lucius looked at them thoughtfully for a moment, then glanced up towards the high table where the teachers were having their lunch. He seemed to be considering something briefly, before giving a slight smile that didn’t entirely reach his eyes.

“Call me Lucius,” he said, a invitation that both Lily and Severus knew was an important gesture. First names tended to mean friendship or a close relationship. Even Mulciber and Avery in their year, who had apparently known each other since birth, referred to each other by surname. Though they realised this may also be connected to personalities as well as some kind of lingering tradition, as both Crabbe and Goyle clearly were more comfortable being addressed with their surnames despite being close to both Lucius and Narcissa. 

Narcissa gave him a horrified look, which almost made Lily laugh. She could see Severus biting his lip to not react too obviously with amusement.

“Do not call me Narcissa,” she told them firmly, which they both nodded at, hiding their grins. Goyle caught their eyes and gave them an amused smile. Being in the same year as her, he was clearly used to all of Narcissa’s opinions. Lily wondered if they had met at Hogwarts, or if they had been friends before like her and Severus.

That evening, after they finished their flying class, they diligently read their assigned book in the warmth of the Common Room, sharing it between them as they did their actual homework as opposed to the homework they had been arbitrarily assigned during lunch. It did not especially convince either of them to become massive Quidditch fans like some of the other students seemed to be, but they approached it like a new facet of the wizarding world to learn about, which helped make it more interesting. 

Term continued, winter ploughing on past both of their birthdays, days that went mostly without note. Lily received a card and small present from her family, Severus neither expected nor received anything. They had never been in the habit of exchanging presents and it didn’t occur to them to start in a castle where they had no opportunities to go to the shops. Had their birthdays been in the spring or summer there would have been options such as gathering wild plants or birds’ eggs as gifts, but the idea of braving the Scottish winter for some interestingly coloured stones was probably best not considered. Rather they just greeted each other and continued with their days, though as Lily received an owl on the morning of her birthday she received a few scattered well wishes of varying degrees of sincerity. Lucius managed to wish her a happy birthday in a way that seemed to suggest he thought birthdays were a bit passé and Narcissa clearly had no interest in whether or not she was happy for the day or not. Narcissa rarely seemed to be interested in whether other people were happy or not. Lily was slightly pleased by receiving some muttered birthday wishes from the other first year Slytherin girls, though it was somewhat mitigated by the fact that they still barely spoke to her.

The next match that Slytherin was due to play, they obediently followed Lucius and Narcissa out of the Common Room through the corridors to the stands, seemingly with every other member of the House. Both of them somewhat lamented how wonderfully peaceful the Common Room would be, ideal circumstances for getting ahead with homework and reading, as well as an extremely empty library for cross-referencing anything more advanced. 

It was cold on the Quidditch pitch, and once they got up into the high stands it was colder. The height exposed them to the vicious Scottish winds that bit savagely through their robes and cloaks, exactly as they had expected both through logical reasoning and their experience with flying class. Had they not been sitting under the watchful eyes of Lucius and Narcissa, they might have turned tail and returned to the warmth of the castle, but there was no such option. It was a particularly annoying combination of knowing that Lucius would be annoyed if they did so, and that it was probably best not to annoy him, as well as knowing that Narcissa would undoubtedly be glad to see the back of them, and so neither of them wanted to give her that satisfaction. It was only a bit of bad weather, and they both had far too much pride to allow themselves to be seen to be defeated by it.

“I wish I’d worn two pairs of socks,” Severus muttered grumpily. He was wearing what had once been Petunia’s socks, and it was probably just as well that they were hidden by the combination of sensible if scuffed black shoes and his black school robe, as they were probably more pastel and lacy than were normal for boys’ socks.

“I wish I had a hat…” Lily added. Her hair blew in her face in a way that made her wish that she’d also thought to plait it before leaving the warmth of the castle. She spat out a mouthful of hair and got a disproving look from Narcissa, who somehow managed to look immaculate regardless of the weather.

As they settled down, they both found that they were warmer within the confines of the stand than they had been when they were moving to the places Lucius had shepherded them towards. It wasn’t entirely protected, but it was far better than their initial impression. 

“We need to learn heating charms…” Severus whispered to her, guessing that it was some kind of magic that kept them somewhat protected from the elements. It wasn’t anything like as warm as inside, but the chill of the air was less than otherwise would be expected, and the wind seemed to blow around them in a way that didn’t fully touch them. 

Obediently, they watched the Quidditch match, grateful that they were not flying around in the miserable Scottish winter. It did not strike either of them as a particularly fun thing to do. They understood the rules, having carefully studied them, and fervently cheered every time Slytherin did something that was judged to be good. The stands were enthusiastic, full of students cheering on their House and friends. Even Lucius, who always seemed too dignified for most things, joined in. Narcissa clapped politely, an elegant smile on her face.

“Miss Black, do you like Quidditch?” Lily asked curiously, wondering if it was obligation that had her attend every match or simply that she considered the sort of yelling that was more common as a means of support to be beneath her. Either was possible, as Narcissa had given the impression that attending Slytherin Quidditch matches was an important duty that all Slytherins were expected to perform, as well as the incessant attitude that everything, especially Lily and Severus, were considerably further down the hierarchical order than her.

Narcissa looked down at her, as if there was an unpleasant smell underneath her nose but she was too polite to express it properly, before saying, “Of course,”

Lily suspected that the unpleasant smell she might be considering was them, in a metaphorical sense. Both her and Severus showered regularly enough that they probably didn’t smell, but Narcissa did seem to dislike them generally as if they were dirty. It was rather like being a dead mouse that the cat had proudly dragged in, only the owner was no where near as impressed as the cat had hoped. Lily wasn’t particularly fond of feeling like she was a dead mouse, especially not one that had probably been slightly chewed. 

It wasn’t much of an answer, as her inflection gave no hints to her sincerity. Lucius hid a slight smile at the interaction. Lily and Severus had discussed what they should call her, given that she had so firmly told them that Narcissa was off the table. They didn’t want to find out what kind of curses she knew, as they could only imagine that there were many and that they would hurt. They also reckoned that offending her might offend Lucius, who it was probably best not to make an enemy of. Had he not paid them any attention, it might not have mattered much, but he seemed to have decided to at least act like he had taken a liking to them. Calling her just Black seemed a little disrespectful, especially given how intimidatingly polished she always was, and it would be confusing given that they already had a Black in their year and there was no way that they would transition to calling him Sirius. That would imply friendship and neither of them could imagine a reality where they would be anything remotely like friends with him. As far as they could tell they were destined to be bitter enemies until the end of time. So their conclusion was that the only real option was to call her Miss Black. It showed a decent amount of respect so she was unlikely to hex them, and avoided any confusion with their mortal enemy in Gryffindor.

Besides, Lily felt that sitting with Lucius and Narcissa at the dinning table, as they now often did, was rather similar to how she would feel sitting in amongst teachers. They were bigger and more powerful, and everyone knew it. She imagined that it was a little like being the teachers pet, something she had observed in Cokeworth but had been sightly too naughty and liable to end up in trouble for accidental magic to actually be fully liked by the teachers. They had always regarded her as a nice girl with an unfortunate tendency towards having her head in the clouds. She had no idea what kind of relationship Severus had had with his primary school teachers, but while he was intelligent and studious she couldn’t quite imagine that it had been a good one. Adults didn’t seem to like him for some reason.

The other first year Slytherins had seemed to Lily to be somewhat impressed with the way they sometimes sat with the older years, though she wasn’t certain if that was just because Lucius and his friends were older or specifically because of who they were. She had a creeping suspicion that it was both. Of course, much like being a teacher’s pet, the attention they received did not lead to overtures of friendship from the other first years. The first year Slytherin boys mostly avoided them like some kind of exotic disease. The girls were polite but distant, never engaging Lily in conversation in their dormitory. It was maybe not ideal, but Lily had stopped minding. She had Severus and magic. That was enough. As far as she could tell, Severus felt the exact same way.

Lily still felt wary about Lucius, not entirely convinced that he saw them as friends. He seemed so much older and grown up, so surely to him it seemed likely that they must seem like children. Just because they felt like turning twelve seemed so old, that they were almost grown up, didn’t mean that adults would view them that way. They both had a lot of experience in that. Aside from that, Lily also distrusted him slightly, mainly because of Narcissa and the intense dislike she held for them seemingly due to nothing more than their muggle blood. At the same time, she had always tended to see the best in people, and despite her slight misgivings she had to admit that Lucius had never been anything other than cordial towards her and Severus.

Those thought distracted her slightly, causing her to miss the culmination of the Quidditch match. This was also in some ways connected to the fact that two people on broomsticks diving for one incredibly tiny ball was actually quite hard to notice properly. The players were visible enough in their brightly Quidditch uniforms, but the Snitch was obviously far too small for anyone to reliably see it, which was in many ways the entire point of the Snitch and the role of the Seeker. Even had she being paying full attention rather than looking at Lucius and Narcissa surreptitiously through her red eye lashes, all she would really have observed would be the two Seekers diving alarmingly towards the ground. Rather than look at the players flying about the stands, she had found herself looking at Narcissa who, for all her usual coldness of manner, seemed to be resting her head against Lucius’s shoulder, clearly under the belief that no one was looking.


	9. Chapter 9

When the Easter holiday came around, both Lucius and Narcissa went home. After a winter of the sun rising after class began and setting before it finished, spring was very welcome. It felt nice to be able to experience actual sunlight rather than the few brief snatches of it that they had grown accustomed to. It was still Scotland, though, so it wasn’t particularly warm. But at least it was no longer dark. Cold weather and regular bouts of rain seemed to be slightly less grim in the daylight. 

It was nice, to have two weeks with no plans, no obligations except homework, nothing much to think of. Both Lily and Severus, for all that they enjoyed their classes and the chance to learn magic, still liked having time off. They could go outside to play in the grounds of Hogwarts, a chance that seemed a lot more exciting after a winter of being cooped up inside the castle. They could even sit by the lake and read or do their homework, which sounded like a lovely idea though the fact that it was still chilly did hinder them slightly. When they first arrived, while the grounds had struck them as beautiful they had been far more enthralled by what laid within the castle, the classes and the knowledge they contained. Now that they were more used to it, and almost feeling familiar with the complex tangle of ever-shifting corridors, the opportunity to explore the grounds appealed to both of them. They had spent a lot of their time together in Cokeworth outside, constantly trampling through thickets and clambering in places they probably weren’t supposed to go.

They had become accustomed to sitting with Lucius and his friends at meal times, and occasionally even in the Common Room when they would find themselves effectively summoned. Sometimes Crabbe or Goyle would intercept them on their way through the Common Room, bouncing along cheerfully only to be caught and brought to the sofas that Lucius preferred. Sometimes Crabbe or Goyle would appear at the entrance to the corner they would otherwise lurk in, barely needing to do more than gesture with a tilt of their head that their presence was required. Neither of them particularly minded, as aside from the fact that Lucius seemed to enjoy asking them some rather odd questions, the older Slytherins mostly just ignored them, allowing them to continue working on whatever homework they had or reading whatever books they were currently working their way through.

However, they were both quite eager to have a fortnight when they would be left entirely to their own devices. There were still school rules to be obeyed, but a break from having direct contact with their teachers and also the older Slytherins meant it would be a proper holiday where they could explore and familiarise themselves with the grounds that spread out from around Hogwarts to a far greater degree than they had been able to during weekends in the depths of winter. The weather had been pretty atrocious, as Lucius had assured them was common for the area, and they had both preferred to skulk around in the warmth of the Common Room, with occasional forays into the library. They had no doubt that everyone else who remained at school would likewise decamp to the lawns surrounding the lake as well, and Lily was secretly hopeful that in the sunlight outside they might forge some friendships. Maybe without Lucius breathing down their necks the other Slytherin girls might be more approachable, or even some of the other Houses.

What they hadn’t counted on, however, was the Marauders. Freed from the obligation of class and presumably as boisterous as the rest of the school with the encroachment of spring, they had decided to take the Easter holiday as an opportunity to play pranks on everyone. Some of their pranks were harmless, if annoying, but the ones that Severus and Lily found themselves on the receiving end they considered to be not particularly amusing. It wasn’t as if they had ever been friends, but it was a battle that Lily thought was deeply unfair. They were outnumbered and while she thought both her and Severus had learnt so much about magic that no one would necessarily be able to tell by their casting or potions that they hadn’t been raised entirely in the wizarding world, they had started from a disadvantage. 

Spending time with Narcissa had just made them both more certain that purebloods learnt scary curses as children, as Narcissa would occasionally mention some quite terrifying anecdotes from her childhood that no one except Lily seemed to find particularly disturbing. Severus was mostly just glad that his father didn’t have magic, as it lessened the ways in which he could hurt him. He had never before been glad of that before, so it was a strange sensation. He still disliked his father, but he had a new found appreciation of the advantages of him being muggle. The other purebloods seemed to either think it was completely normal, or at the very least normal for the Blacks. Which it was Lily couldn’t say as she hadn’t quite dared to ask. She felt quite grateful for her unbelievably ordinary parents, as while they might be nothing fancy they were, to her mind, good parents.

Despite the chill and hint of damp that lingered in the air, they headed out to sit by the lake after lunch. Lunch had been eventful and Lily had had to have an unplanned shower to wash custard out of her hair. She was not happy about it, though the teachers seemed to view it as just a harmless bit of student interaction. The Marauders, who she suspected to have been the culprits, seemed disappointed that it was only Lily who ended up covered in custard. Severus had, with impeccably good timing, chosen that precise moment to duck under the table to rummage in his book bag.

“What a waste of perfectly good custard,” he commented as they decided on a relatively secluded spot to sit by the lake. Lily’s hair was still damp, and despite the sunlight the breeze was cold, making her colder. She almost growled in annoyance.

“I know,” she grumbled, “And it was so difficult to wash out of my hair and my robes need washing now too. And I dripped custard all the way through the school and the Common Room, I’m going to have to find Mr Filch and apologise or something. It was dreadful. I hate them,”

By the time she had emerged from the shower and they left the Common Room, the traces of custard had vanished from the corridors, so they assumed in the interim that Filch had cleaned up the mess. It would definitely have been an easier job than cleaning up the vast quantities of custard that had also covered a portion of the Slytherin table in addition to Lily. Severus had waited patiently for her to emerge, clean and still seething. Had it happened to someone else, someone she particularly disliked, she might have found it amusing, but being the victim was not to her mind funny. Severus wasn’t amused either, which she was glad to note. The Marauders and quite a decent amount of Gryffindor had found it to be hilarious though.

“We can go find him later,” Severus suggested, suspecting that it was possibly an unnecessary act but also knowing that Lily tended towards kindness. It was one of the things he both liked about her and found incredibly fascinating. He had never really encountered anyone kind before he met her, so it was quite a revelation. It meant that she would put effort into doing things he would never himself consider bothering with, but when he questioned her she tended to call him mean. They would probably run into Filch at some point over the Easter holiday, meaning that searching for him was unlikely to be a strenuous task so Severus felt no need to object. It would make Lily happy without greatly inconveniencing either of them.

Lily sighed despondently, sinking to the ground. Severus joined her, leaning against a large rock that helped to hide them from view slightly from the rest of the grounds. They had always sought out slightly secluded and hidden places to sit when they were children playing in Cokeworth, as such places made the best kind of dens. It also made it harder for adults or Petunia to find them, which was a distinct advantage, meaning that they could talk, plan and generally exist without any external bother. They hadn’t intentionally set out to recreate the same circumstances at Hogwarts, but it had somehow just happened naturally. The eternal suspicion that they were not fully welcome in Slytherin combined with their previous tendency to lurk in corners had lead to their usual place for spending time in the Common Room being the corner of the floor that no one else was interested in, and with the exception of the few occasions when Lucius called them over to sit by him on the sofa, no one else ever expressed much interest in spending time with them so they had continued to sit secluded away from everyone else.

Outside the Common Room, the Marauders’ more recent pranks had kept their vigilance high, to an even higher degree than when they had skulked in hidden groves of nettles to avoid Petunia’s scoldings, so they had automatically honed in on a more protected area of the grounds to sit. It was similar to the way that they had found a preference to sitting in one specific corner of the library, where people tended to overlook them and they were less likely to be attacked.

“Do you think it’s because it’s Easter and we don’t have class?” Lily wondered out loud. Before her the lake stretched out, a still vastness of water that hid the depths that lurked beneath, the depths that she loved to gaze at through the windows of the the Slytherin Common Room.

“Maybe…” Severus said thoughtfully, “Maybe… it’s also because Lucius is gone?”

The sounds of spring, bird singing and bees buzzing, hummed away in the background. Lily sighed, her mind full of thoughts that had no place amongst such lovely scenery.

“They’re bullies,” she said grumpily, “So they pick on people that are weaker than them…”

She didn’t like what that seemed to say about the relative position of her and Severus in regards to not only the Marauders but also the rest of the school.

“But Lucius is a sixth year, and a prefect,” Severus said, his annoyance at the situation clear from his tone of voice, “And he’s from a good, respectable, rich pureblood family. They wouldn’t dare attack him…”

“I don’t think they’re bright enough to think it through like that,” Lily pointed out, having a very low opinion of the boys in question, but also reluctantly accepting that he might have a point.

“Maybe…” Severus accepted, also having a very low opinion of the Marauders, “I guess they do do stuff in class even though they’ll get in trouble…”

“I guess Lucius is a bit like a teacher though, keeping them away like they would stay away more if we were always around a teacher…” Lily continued, “And I guess if they accidentally got him covered in custard he would be able to seek revenge better than us…”

For a moment, they both paused in their conversation to enjoy the mental image of Lucius using all of the more unpleasant curses that they had encountered, though not necessarily learnt yet, in their various studies. It gave them both a certain amount of pleasure, and they shared a slightly malicious set of grins.

“One day,” Severus said with determination, “One day we’ll be so powerful that they’ll look up to us and would never even dare think of doing things like covering us in custard,”

Lily nodded resolutely, “We’ll show them. We’ll learn and be far better than anyone thinks we possibly can be,”

There was something slightly liberating about being Slytherin, Lily had realised. Ambition was a House trait and so expressing a desire to be good at something, to research something more or really any form of passion seemed to be treated as a manifestation of ambition, no matter who a person was. She also knew that they weren’t just boasting or dreaming idly, they were getting reliably good marks in all their classes, and Lily felt that she was feeling really quite at home. She was less convinced by all the other students in the school, who she was not particularly keen on, but in many ways it was no different to being back in Cokeworth. 

There she and Severus had been set apart from the rest of the town, different in part because as Severus had pointed out they were. They had magic and so they went to Hogwarts, their paths diverted from the track that was the only option available to Petunia and her parents. She had often wondered about Eileen, why it could possibly be that she would chose a life of mundanity in Spinner’s End when she had had the option of living in the magical world, but she had a sinking suspicion that just as muggleborns and halfbloods were not particularly welcomed, a muggle husband too would be met with disapproval. Lily didn’t mind as much as she had initially thought she would. It wasn’t as if she were entirely alone and friendless, it just meant that she was in a similar state to her childhood before leaving Cokeworth for Hogwarts. In the castle she still counted only one true, good friend, but Severus was a loyal and reliable friend. She was certain that their friendship would never waver. It was a reassuring fact to always be able to bear in mind. 

There was something nice about them both being able to explore the wonders of magic together. She smiled across at him and he smiled back, less enthusiastically but she was used to that. Naturally the conversation faded to that of their holiday homework, not to complain but to discuss where they might be able to find the answers to some of the questions. It was relaxing, to sit and chatter away about magic freely in the slightly cold Scottish sunlight, the castle imposing but beautiful behind them, the lake sparkling and hiding all sorts of mysteries in front of them. Cokeworth had never been so beautiful, and they had always had to be careful of never letting their secret out, as Severus had passed on Eileen’s tales of what would happen to those that accidentally revealed magic to muggles. Lily had been just as scared of the descriptions of Azkaban and the Dementors as Severus had been, and so they had been very careful. Petunia was in many ways the exception, as she already knew and as Lily had never been punished for that she assumed that it was alright to discuss magic in front of her. As an additional bonus, it had always annoyed Petunia whenever they discussed magic, so they had both done so with glee. Lily was still annoyed at her sister, and while she was hopeful that come summer they would make up, she was also not in the mood to be forgiving. As it stood, she was being left with the impression that she was innately unwelcome and unwanted in both worlds. 

“Wouldn’t it be nice if we could sail about on the lake,” Severus mused, clearly inspired by their ongoing reading of the _Swallows and Amazons_ series. It was a world away from their daily lives, and it amused Lily to no end that any other muggle would read a fantasy book about magic and dream about that, whereas she and Severus were reading about perfectly mundane muggle things like sailing and playing make believe while living a life filled with magic. 

“There’s boats,” Lily said thoughtfully, remembering the boats they had approached the castle on, sailing across the lake in a fleet of first years when they first arrived, “But I guess no one uses them?”

They shared a look, unsure what the point of the school owning an entire armada of boats just for one trip a year. It seemed somewhat wasteful. Had the boats been available for the children to play with in any way, the Easter holiday did seem to be the perfect moment to do so but the lake was entirely devoid of student activity. The only thing visible on the surface was the lazy tentacles of the Giant Squid.

“Maybe the Squid eats people?” Severus suggested, which would make the decision to send the first years across the lake by boat a considerably more risky one.

“…But then some years there’d just be no sorting ceremony because all the new students got eaten…” Lily said. They both giggled slightly, though they weren’t entirely convinced that it wasn’t entirely possible.

“Maybe…” Severus started, a slight grin on his face that Lily recognised as a plan that might not be fully approved of by adults, “Maybe in a few years we’ll know enough spells to steal a boat, sail across the lake and claim the Squid for Slytherin. Like explorers do,”

Lily sniggered at the thought, resting her head closer to his as they both enjoyed the thought of the lake, of sailing and of everything yet to come. 

As it happened, when they did run into Filch it was pure coincidence. They had wandered the hallways, but neither of them could remember exactly where the caretaker’s office was so they hadn’t been able to find him when they went looking. They suspected that he probably wouldn’t be spending much time in his office anyway, as the Marauders’ presumed discovery of the existence of exploding slime had resulted in them exploding slime over as much of the castle as they could. Both Lily and Severus had continued to be targets, and subsequently both of them had had far more showers over the course of the fortnight than they had intended. 

Their robes had also needed washing far more than they had initially anticipated and Severus, whose robes were second hand already, was starting to despair slightly at them being worn out far faster than they should be. He wasn’t sure when he would next be bought new robes, or more accurately, new second hand robes. He knew that he would be getting properly new robes once he grew up, got an amazing job and made loads of money. His mother would not be buying them for him. He wasn’t certain how much robes cost or how much money was normal for adults to earn, he just knew that he would aim for the top.

Filch was grumpily mopping green slime off the corridors outside the library as they left it, intending to head back to the Common Room. Both Severus and Lily had a moment of relief that the slime was outside the library rather than inside it, as they didn’t want to imagine the damage it could have done to the books within. That was a part of the reason why Madam Pince had started to give the Marauders very suspicious looks every time they entered, which made the library almost as safe as the Slytherin Common Room. They both loved the way so many of the books in the library were incredibly old, and smelt as if they contained the wisdom of centuries.

“Mr Filch!” Lily said, smiling widely, “I’ve been hoping to find you,”

It was not exactly the reaction he was used to receiving, definitely not from students. For the most parts, people tended to avoid Filch. They had done so his entire life, and since becoming caretaker of Hogwarts that trend had only continued.

“Why?” he asked, momentarily worried. The only reason he could think of that any one had been looking for him was because they had either caused more mess or had found some, but either way he knew it was likely to add more to his work-load. He liked the way she called him Mr Filch though, as few people ever bothered to give him a title as a sign of respect. It came of being a Squib.

“At the beginning of the holidays, the Marauders exploded custard in my face and I dripped custard all the way to the Common Room, so I wanted to apologise for that, but they also covered me in slime a lot too since then so I’ve probably dripped some of that along the corridors too, so I’m very sorry about that. Thank you for cleaning it up,” Lily said, shuffling apologetically.

“Sorry,” Severus added, as he too had undoubtedly dripped some slime, though the slime was a lot less likely to drip off them than the custard had been. It had also been a lot harder to wash out, which Lily had complained at length to Severus about, as he had no personal experience in being covered in custard and needing to wash it off. The slime had stuck persistently to their hair and skin, requiring quite a lot of scrubbing, and they both assumed that their robes had needed very thorough washing too, though as of yet they had not figured out quite how laundry at Hogwarts worked. They assumed it was not Filch who did the laundry, though they had yet to be told who did. It wasn’t actually covered in _Hogwarts: A History_ , which was interesting in many ways given that it was a relevant issue, but it hadn’t particularly occurred to either of them to ask anyone. It was not the most important question either of them had about either the wizarding world or the castle that they lived in. 

Filch looked at Lily curiously for a moment, almost as if he were unused to sincerity, apologies or politeness in general, but he could find nothing mocking in her actions. She continued to look apologetic, guilty at having inadvertently caused him more work despite the fact that it wasn’t her fault.

“…That’s… alright…” Filch said eventually, trying to adjust to the surreal sensation of having someone apologise for accidentally traipsing something over the castle. The Marauders had very quickly become his least favourite students in the entire castle for their love of causing chaos as well as their dislike of obeying authority figures. He smiled at the two of them, something he didn’t do very often. 

That was why he found himself acting out of character and inviting them to have a cup of tea with him in his dimly lit office. It was slightly awkward, a grumpy man with two uncertain children, but it was the most social contact he had had in a long time, even given his lonely life up until his move to Hogwarts.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have never really been satisfied with the title of this fic. I don’t know if it’s obvious, but it was only named because I had decided I disliked the name it is (still) saved under on my computer and couldn’t think of anything better than a phrase from the chapter I had literally just done a presentation on in class. It’s not bad and in some ways reflective of the whole story. But it’s also a bit too long to be ideal. So I’ve been going back over other potential names. I’m currently considering ‘Earthbound Misfits’ but I don't really know. Sorry for the rambling, this is just a warning that the name may change. If you have any feelings on the matter, please let me know I guess…?

When classes started after the Easter holidays, it was in some ways a relief. With Lucius back, Severus and Lily once again found themselves spending their lunchtimes with him, though now they were more grateful for his presence. As if proving their hypothesis, the Marauders backed off considerably. If there was an opportunity, the Marauders could still be counted on to take it, but with lunchtimes taken out of the equation there were less openings. 

Lily and Severus were quite glad to be back at class as well. The break hadn’t been anything like as quiet and relaxing as they had hoped, and they did like being able to learn even if some of their teachers were not very good at the act of teaching. To their slight confusion, their Defence Against the Dark Arts teachers failed to show up for any of his classes. He wasn’t particularly missed, as no one really paid much attention to him anyway, so the Defence classes continued on in their usual fashion of unbridled chaos. It was a good way to practise defensive charms, as they came in useful against any of the more malicious spells heading their way, but that required study outside of class. In some ways that was a bit of a paradox. Lily and Severus had given up trying to follow what he had been trying to teach them anyway, and had instead spent the lessons studying the spells they thought would be useful, so they didn’t particularly mind too much. No one really noticed or commented on it, as far as Lily could tell. It would appear that over the course of the Easter holiday he had simply vanished into thin air, which she hadn’t realised wizards or witches could actually do. It was faintly disconcerting.

“What do you think happened to him?” Lily wondered aloud, sitting on the floor of the Common Room in the corner she not only thought of as her and Severus’s, but had actually heard Lucius refer to as such. He hadn’t actually called it Lily and Severus’s corner, he had called it the mudblood’s corner, but Lily knew that he meant them. She didn’t particularly like being referred to as a mudblood, and Severus had agreed that it sounded like an insult, but it was the word that everyone seemed to use. At least Lucius no longer used it in a manner that seemed to be malicious, just a matter-of-fact statement about their status in comparison with most of the rest of the school. 

“If it was something dramatic or interesting I guess we’d have heard about it…” Severus mused thoughtfully, “It seems like something Lucius would at the very least mention…”

“True,” Lily said, wrinkling her nose. They had a moment of contemplative silence, wondering. His disappearance was slightly alarming, if nothing else for the fact that it suggested in the wizarding world people occasionally disappeared and no one really though it worth commenting on. 

“I think he’s using us,” she said after a moment, quietly and slightly uncertain. Severus didn’t respond immediately, but she knew that he knew she was talking about Lucius rather than their missing teacher. Their missing teacher probably wasn’t even aware they existed, let alone having the kind of awareness necessary to use them for malicious means, though there was always the off chance that he was playing an incredibly complicated game using them all. Lily thought that was extremely unlikely. Aside from anything else, the mysterious disappearance made no sense. Maybe had it been a badly written fantasy novel, but while she liked stories she was aware that they were make-believe and therefore bore no holding on reality.

“Probably,” Severus agreed, to her surprise. He had seemed more taken with Lucius, though Lily had to admit that despite her misgivings she did also like the older Slytherin. He was capable of the kind of easy charisma that made people appealing, though there was also clearly a very self-centred element of steel hidden behind the elegant smile he presented to the world. She wondered if it was because she had never before spent so much time just observing people from the outside or if it was something unique to Slytherins who were supposed to be ambitious and cunning, but she had started to notice that most people had ulterior motives. 

She blinked in surprise at him, tilting her head slightly. Her hair spilled over into her face, and she once again mentally cursed. The problem with hair was that it grew when you weren’t paying attention. Severus’s had grown quite disreputably long over the course of their time at Hogwarts too, though not as long as hers due to having started with shorter hair. There seemed to be no option for getting their hair cut at the school. Getting her hair cut was an act that Lily had always found to be one of the many annoying obligations her mother forced upon her but she was starting to see the appeal of it, as well as wondering how it was that the other children managed to stay looking so well groomed.

Lily sighed. It seemed rather cold to be aware of using people for your own gain, but also rather Slytherin. It was one of those things she was just adjusting to. She wondered if it was more than just a Slytherin thing, if it was actually a magical thing. She wondered if the other Houses were the same, or if they were different. She couldn’t quite imagine it. 

“It’s OK,” Severus continued, getting a confused look from her. She wasn’t certain how alright she was with the idea of casually being used, even if it wasn’t in a particularly unpleasant manner. It just struck her as being slightly harsh, she wanted people to like her for who she was not what she could do for them. She wanted more people to like her the way Severus liked her, and for them to like him the way she liked him. 

“We’re using him too,” Severus clarified, which Lily thought was slightly inaccurate. It was true that spending time around Lucius seemed to raise their profile and standing within the House, and seemed to provide them with some kind of protection, but that wasn’t really something they were intentionally doing. They had only really discovered that side effect by chance. 

“Are we though?” she mused, not sure how she felt about using people. She would rather just be friends and be able to believe that her friends felt the same way. The only person left in her life that she had that kind of relationship with was Severus. She refused to contemplate any possible future where that might change. It didn’t seem at all realistic to think that they wouldn’t be friends for the rest of eternity. 

Severus seemed to be thinking, wondering about the question, “Is there anything you would want?” he asked curiously, “Say in the Common Room or something? In an ideal world?”

“The radio,” Lily answered immediately, having spent a lot of time lamenting the state of the ancient wireless in the Common Room, “The wireless. It only gets one channel. I wanted to listen to TMS, but I can’t, so I would want a radio that gets that,”

Her father loved cricket, and while his wife and elder daughter had little interest he had managed to install a devotion of it into Lily as well, who had by association made Severus listen to it on the radio too. For Lily the discovery that not only did muggle electronics not work at Hogwarts but that the ancient old wireless that was provided in the Common Room couldn’t receive any of the muggle channels she might be interested in had been an unwelcome culture shock. It hadn’t been something she really thought about initially, especially over the winter, but she knew that the Ashes were approaching and she felt a certain sadness at the thought that she would be unable to at least listen along even if she couldn’t have conversations about the day’s play with her father. It felt as if she was having to give up a part of her that she had always considered to be a crucial element that combined with all the other parts of what made her her to produce the final finished product. The idea that she would have to abandon interests and hobbies simply because they were unavailable at Hogwarts struck her as a shame as well as potentially deeply unfair. 

While Lily was not entirely certain if Severus’s interest had been completely genuine or mainly due to her own passion, they had had plenty of conversations about it, sitting by the radio in her family’s living room as her father muttered about statistics and cricketers from bygone eras. She had initially just assumed that they would continue as they always had done, only now it would be a case of listening with friends in the Common Room rather than with her father. Even if she had quickly had to fine-tune her imagination to accept that it would likely just be her and Severus, she had still held out hope that they could at the very least listen to the tests. 

“Why don’t we try telling Lucius?” Severus suggested, “Subtly mentioning it, you know?”

“Like, dropping hints into the conversation?” Lily wondered, “Not directly asking him to do us a favour or anything, but mentioning we would like a proper radio and seeing what happens?”

“Yeah,” Severus said. They shared a slightly uncomfortable look. It didn’t seem particularly moral, but it did seem very cunning. Lily wasn’t sure if she was really all that cunning. She thought Severus was, he had that kind of mind that could think in those dimensions and in a way Lily admired that. It was definitely useful, and she knew that Slytherin was a House renowned for its cunning. She felt she was more at ease with just being honestly ambitious, but she could also acknowledge that subtle methods tended to go more smoothly. It was something she felt she would have to work at, especially if she was surrounded by people who had a head start when it came to cunning. She had to admit, in many ways she could see Severus’s logic. A wireless was a relatively small thing to want, and something completely mundane. She’d heard Madeleine mutter about wanting a proper wireless as well, so she knew it wasn’t a desire that the two of them might be alone in. Lucius was clearly rich and had no problem using his wealth. Having him use his wealth or influence for the benefit of the whole House was a good idea. Neither of them could afford to buy their own little radio, even had they had the first idea about how to go about buying one. Lucius obviously would.

For a moment she started to think, wondering if indeed his wealth and influence might be a weakness as much as it was a strength. Even if her and Severus were just little minnows in the grand scheme of things, if they had a big fish they could use then their powerlessness would be greatly reduced. If it was the case that Lucius took as much pride in his wealth and influence as he appeared to, then any kind of hint that he wasn’t quite rich enough or powerful enough to arrange things the way they wanted would potentially be an incentive to prove that he was. She looked at Severus with slightly worried eyes. He seemed less concerned about the implications of moral issues, though it was clear to her that he was thinking along the same lines. There was nothing malicious in his face that she could see, just a thoughtful optimism, as if he were hopeful for the future. 

As far as Lucius was concerned, Lily and Severus virtually materialised before him. He had been reading a particularly interesting book on the theories of time travel, when he looked up to see them standing in front of him, waiting. They shuffled slightly awkwardly, before sitting down on the sofa by him. It was in many ways slightly unusual, as they tended to spend their time skulking in corners rather than sitting with him on the sofas. He had put it down to being some strange muggle custom that he didn’t understand. He didn’t know much about muggles, and had always had little interest in learning. He reasoned that it may well be the case that muggles didn’t have chairs, and therefore the two of them felt more comfortable on the floor. It was interesting, and he had to admit it intrigued him a little to hear their misconceptions about the wizarding world. It made him curious in a way he had never before been about the world that had produced Lily and Severus, whereas before he had always just dismissed anything muggle as being too inferior to even deign thinking about. 

“…Hi…” he said, waiting curiously, wondering what it was that they wanted.

“Hi,” Severus said brightly, in a way that was, as far as Lucius could tell, faintly out of character for him. He would admit that he didn’t know Severus that well, but as far as he could tell Severus was rarely enthusiastic about general conversation. Obscure magic and weird things in general, yes, but not the concept of human contact. Lucius wasn’t entirely sure, but he found the odd awkwardness strangely endearing after a lifetime of being exposed to those who’d been raised with the help of etiquette classes.

“How are you?” Lily asked with far more enthusiasm and cheer than the question deserved, suggesting that she had only a limited grasp on the concept of small talk. She did tend to be bright and cheerful, especially when compared to Severus, but like Severus she also tended to skip the general pleasantries to gush with unholy delight over things such as the many uses of flobberworm pus. These were things that were never mentioned in polite conversation, so Lucius after the initial surreal sensation of horror had grown to find it unspeakably hilarious how enthusiastic the two of them could be over things that they really should have learnt not to mention outside of class. He had never before witnessed anyone muggle raised encountering the wizarding world, and there was something satisfactory about how their reactions proved how superior the wizarding world clearly was. 

“I’m fine,” Lucius replied calmly, trying not to smile, “How are you?”

“Good,” Lily answered quickly, before giving a slight wince that suggested she hadn’t thought the answer through as much as she intended to. She looked at Severus seemingly for help but he just shrugged at her. Lucius wondered if there was something wrong, as they both seemed uncharacteristically on edge. He tried to wrack his brain for a reason, wondering if it was a problem with either a classmate or maybe some difficult homework. Either seemed possible. It was flattering if they had a problem that they might have decided to take it up with him. He was after all both a prefect and a Malfoy. 

“Is there some kind of problem?” he asked, not trusting their ability to make conversation in the way he might have done had they been pretty much anyone else. He was tempted to let them continue to demonstrate their complete inability to conduct small talk like normal human beings, but he wasn’t sure if he would be able to keep a straight face through it. Besides, he didn’t want to risk them not actually spitting out whatever they wanted to say, as while it would be unbelievably entertaining to watch them tie themselves in knots, it would look far better for him to be a helpful prefect capable of solving all sorts of problems.

The two of them looked at each other awkwardly, fidgeting slightly. There was a moment of silence as they both hesitated, each of them wordlessly hinting to the other to speak using nothing but their eyes. Lucius waited. Patience was a virtue after all, his parents had always been clear to instil that in him from a young age. 

“The problem is,” Lily said eventually, “The wireless doesn’t receive longwave, it just gets the WWN, but Test Match Special is on BBC radio 4 longwave,”

Lucius looked at her as if she was speaking a foreign language, full of words and concepts he didn’t understand. He was familiar with the wireless, and he was very much aware that the one that was in the Slytherin Common Room was not a particularly flashy model. It was old, the style suggesting it to be from the pre-war era, and it could only receive the one channel. There weren’t many channels available from the Wizarding Wireless Network, though he was vaguely aware that some modern models had been designed to pick up the muggle channels as well though he had no interest in such things. He had little interest in the wireless in general, as he tended to find the contents broadcast to be incredibly inane.

“Is… that important?” he asked, “That you are able to listen to this programme?”

Lily stared at him for a moment, as if he were an alien species only just discovered. It was the exact opposite of the way their conversations and interactions normally went. 

“It’s the Ashes,” she said, as if she was explaining the most obvious thing in the universe, “They start next Thursday,”

There was a pause as her explanation continued to make no sense to Lucius. To Lily it made perfect sense.

“Which are important…?” Lucius deduced, feeling that the more Lily talked the more lost he felt.

“It’s a matter of life and death,” Lily said, her face entirely serious, her green eyes giving him a despairingly imploring look.

“It… is…?” Lucius asked worriedly, switching his gaze abruptly to Severus, standing beside her quietly. His expression was concerned, an enquiring gaze seeking answers. Life or death sounded very serious, even if he didn’t quite understand the root cause. It didn’t appear likely that he would be getting an explanation out of Lily.

Severus nodded, his expression sincere and eyes innocently wide. As far as he was concerned, it wasn’t his fault if purebloods couldn’t understand the concept of hyperbole. If it added to the chances of them getting some kind of wireless that would allow them to receive BBC 4 longwave and listen to the cricket, Severus wasn’t going to clear up any misapprehensions he and Lily might be giving Lucius. Lucius nodded his understanding, though he didn’t really understand, an uncharacteristic expression of uncertain concern on his face. He frowned slightly, as if thinking hard.

“I’ll see what I can do…” he said vaguely, looking thoughtfully at the old wireless in the corner of the Common Room. The sound quality had clearly suffered from age, and the channel selection was limited to the least interesting channel possible for the young, but it did still see the occasional bit of use. It would benefit the whole House, and it was the kind of conscientious gesture that demonstrated that he would be a perfectly capable Head Boy. At least, he hoped so. 

Lucius was as good as his word. Within the week, brand new wirelesses that could receive multiple channels including a few muggle ones had appeared in the Common Room, replacing the old one. One of the smaller, portable models had even been placed in the corner that Lily and Severus tended to spend their time in. It took Lily almost no time at all to tune it in to BBC 4 longwave. They shared smiles over the slight static.

“Should we say thank you?” Lily wondered, as while there had been no official announcements about where they had come from everyone knew the answer to be the Malfoy bank account.

“Maybe not directly…?” Severus mused. He wasn’t used to thanking people, mainly because there were rarely occurrences in his life that would warrant gratitude. 

When the Ashes did finally come on, they listened and Lucius was relieved to notice that there was no dying involved. Instead there was the occasional whoop in response to whatever it was that Lily and Severus were listening to. On one occasion Lily graced the entire Common Room with a victory dance, not so much because she intended to do so but because she was particularly buoyed with feelings. 

As far as they were concerned, the year ended well. Lily was faintly disappointed to realise that she had spent a whole year sleeping in the same room as the three other first year Slytherin girls and yet they were barely more than acquaintances, but that paled in comparison to the fact that she had learnt far more magic than she had even dreamed to be possible. Both Lily and Severus got good, solid marks in all their classes and were excited to continue learning more in their second year. Even if Slytherin didn’t win the House Cup at the end of the year, they were both still proud of the points they had earned. 

At the leaving feast, Dumbledore had announced that their Defence teacher had been found locked in a cupboard. It took Lily and Severus a few moments to realise that was who he was talking about, as they had never managed to catch his name until that moment. The outcome of his time spent locked in a cupboard had been that he had reconsidered his career path and was therefore leaving Hogwarts to take up professional owl-breeding. Neither Lily nor Severus had realised that there was such a career, but they both imagined it might suit him better. Lucius had nodded in a calm and understanding manner, as if he had been expecting something of the sort, and Lily had been a little shocked to see money exchange hands amongst the older Slytherins, clearly the result of a bet into the outcome of their teacher’s future. 

She was looking forward to seeing her family again, hopeful that Petunia would have finally forgotten their past arguments. Severus was clearly reluctant to board the train, but he did so anyway. In all fairness, it wasn’t like he had much choice in the matter. Lily couldn’t really blame him. She was rather afraid of his parents as well, and personally thought that they weren’t very nice people. She never said anything about his mother at least, and was very careful to only say bad things about his father when it was Severus who had brought it up, but personally she disliked them both. They left him free in a way her parents never did, but they also never seemed to care too much about how he was doing. Her parents had spent a lot of time arranging how they would pick her up. Severus, having had no contact from his parents and no reply from his mother, had eventually admitted as much to her and so she had asked her parents to also give him a lift back up to Cokeworth. Her father had agreed, to both their relief, so Lily knew that once they disembarked the train they would have a lengthy car journey presumably with the radio on in the background. At least at the end of it she would have her childhood bed to sink down into and sleep. She didn’t know what it was that would await Severus in Spinner’s End, though she assumed it would not be as nice as her little room.


	11. Chapter 11

Cokeworth was as unbelievably dull as both Lily and Severus had remembered. Having no class and being able to play freely out of doors without any threat from the Marauders was good, but it was also somewhat disappointing in comparison to a magical castle. Severus missed the regular meals that appeared out of nowhere on plates that seemingly cleaned themselves. Lily missed the lack of direct adult supervision. The teachers at Hogwarts didn’t particularly care what she did in the Common Room, and for the most part directions outside of class were very hands-off. Her parents by comparison had more strict ideas.

Within two weeks of her being back home, Lily’s mother had begun combing through her hair for lice, which Lily grumpily submitted to. It was true that she had been scratching at her scalp, and that she couldn’t comb through as easily herself. She envied Severus, who despite also having returned to his previous eternal habit of scratching at his head was not forced to wash his hair with the unpleasant toxins her mother made her use. Uncharitably she blamed Cokeworth in general for the entire situation. The fact that Petunia still clearly disliked her also caused friction. Luckily, she hadn’t accused Lily of stealing her socks, but Lily had also made sure that she never wore any of the ones she had taken. They remained carefully hidden in her trunk, under her upturned cauldron. She was fairly confident Petunia wouldn’t find them. Petunia still seemed to suspect her though, but luckily without any proof there had been no accusations. 

Aside from that, it was just the same as any other summer holiday had been the entire time that Lily and Severus had been at primary school. Lily was glad to see her family again after a long absence, but she still spent most of her days out of doors with Severus. He spent more time outside than she did, partly because as far as she could tell his parents had never specified a time he was to be home by. Like he did virtually every summer he tanned darkly, a stark contrast to Lily’s skin which always stayed stubbornly pale. All the sunlight brought out were her freckles, which while faded in winter tended to be revealed in the summer. It wasn’t a perfect summer, because those were rare. It was colder than would have been ideal for a lot of the time, and there were a fair share of rainy days. But there were good days and days when despite the general greyness Lily and Severus sat on the large pipe that they both suspected carried either factory waste water or sewage over the small stream that they lived by. It was relatively clean, at least in comparison to the streams and rivers around the area in general, though probably not as clean as any of the waters around Hogwarts. It seemed that the industrial revolution had entirely bypassed Hogwarts. 

They read slower in summer, which in some ways made no sense. Without classes or homework, it would have made far more sense that they would devour their way through books at a speed of knots, leaving entire series in their wake. But Lily at least had her family to take up her attention a lot of the time, and having spent so much of the year far away from them no matter how much Petunia annoyed her she still wanted to make the most of the weeks she had with them. Severus was more ambivalent about his family, as he always had been. It often occurred to Lily that he could easily have siblings that he had simply not bothered mentioning to her. Sometimes, when she was lost in silly dreams of fantasy, she thought that it would make perfect sense if he was in fact the heir to some obscure throne, or a secret royal, hidden away for his own safety. She also was old enough to know that those were ridiculous thoughts and that he was just a boy that didn’t like talking much about his family. 

Without their evenings together in the Common Room, mixed in between homework and study, or the weekends hiding in the library away from the cold Scottish weather and the Marauders, they had less moments when it seemed natural to just be reading. It also reduced their available books, as while they had access to the public library, unlike the Hogwarts library it contained no books about magic. For that they were limited to what they themselves owned, though despite their continued curiosity and desire to learn, they also felt that it seemed right to take a slight break from that. It was also a lot harder to read those books safely, as Petunia would make snearing comments whenever she caught Lily reading her spell books, and Lily never really asked what it was Tobias would do if he noticed Severus with spell books but she could guess it was not good. They still had to do homework, though, and they had discussed it together. It seemed like there was forever to do it, unlike the usual quick turn around they would have at school, the weeks stretching into eternity between the beginnings of summer until the autumn when they would once again make the trip via King’s Cross Station to Hogwarts. 

As such their reading for pleasure had dwindled to just a small amount of muggle fiction. It seemed like a waste to read Lily’s book that they could take with them for second year, so they were reading their way through the books in the local library. It was also less practical to swap books every chapter as they had been doing, an admittedly odd method that they had adjusted to but which didn’t work so well when they no longer lived quite as close as they did in term time. When the weather was good they didn’t want to waste it by being indoors, especially when they had no fear of being harassed by the Marauders. They had the usual issue of the adults, both their parents and also the ones that simply seemed to exist to tell them off, which was in many ways no different from the teachers at school, but they were familiar with Cokeworth and the muggle world so it took little effort to adjust back to the life they had known before they started Hogwarts.

Lily had started _Jane Eyre_ , but she hadn’t managed to finish it. She had tried to persevere, unwilling to give up something she had started. She kept thinking that Jane’s miserable life would improve, but things had just continued to get worse so she had abandoned it for later. Instead, they had opted for Sherlock Homes. People being murdered in complicated ways was far more cheerful that best friends of pitiful orphans dying. So they waded their way through all manner of cases with a certain amount of glee. Severus had also picked up an Arsène Lupin book, which had caught their eye due to the name. They had both agreed quite quickly that they liked him more than the Remus Lupin they went to school with. He seemed to steal more impressive things than socks and parma violets, though they could dream of bigger things when they were themselves bigger. 

As well as their homework, exploring the outside world to see what had changed in their absence and reading whatever fiction took their fancy, they were also making sock puppets, as it seemed like a good idea. Besides, they had reasoned, sock puppets were kind of snake-like and so it was a very Slytherin thing to do. They were using Severus’s father’s socks, carefully stolen. Lily had been slightly nervous about that, until Severus had reassured her that they were odd socks and therefore he was unlikely to notice. Severus was the expert on his father’s temper, so Lily had bowed to his greater knowledge. She had suggested they use Petunia’s socks, but Tobias’s were bigger and therefore seemed to form better snakes. They also had less frills, which was another advantage, as frills would be better suited to some kind of newt or salamander. Severus’s snake was a dark green and Lily’s was a lighter, brighter colour not too dissimilar to her eyes. She was very impressed with Severus’s attention to detail, in managing to get green socks for their project.

As Severus had provided the socks, Lily had provided the buttons for their eyes. Severus’s snake was getting odd eyes, which had come from Lily’s mother’s collection of haberdashery. They were the same style, but different colours, one black and one white. They both thought it would be very dramatic and eye-catching. Lily was giving hers pretty pink eyes. Only one of the buttons had been in her mother’s sewing kit, awaiting her mother’s attention. It had originally come from one of Petunia’s cardigans, but had fallen off and so her mother was intending to sew it back on at some point. That had been a while back, however, so Lily felt no guilt at taking the button. She had after all yelled, “Mum, I’m just taking a few buttons for a project…” as she shoved them in her pocket, which she considered to be asking for permission. The fact that her mother was in another room, cooking tea and therefore potentially unable to hear her, was not a relevant fact. Neither was the fact that she’d sneaked into Petunia’s room to locate the cardigan with the missing button to carefully tug off another one, so she had a nice set for her snake’s eyes. Petunia wasn’t wearing it, and didn’t seem that upset at it being ignored in her wardrobe, so Lily considered it to be justified. Her needs were far greater. The buttons really were perfect for her little snake. She was certain that it would be adorable when she was finished. In comparison, the cardigan had been mediocre at best, even accounting for Petunia’s taste in clothing. Petunia was bound to grow out of it at some point anyway, as all of them were at the growing age. 

“They need names,” Lily said thoughtfully, as she stitched. She didn’t raise her eyes from her task as the last time she had allowed herself to be distracted while sewing she had accidentally stabbed herself with her needle, which had hurt and she was trying to avoid that.

“Like Boot or Shoe,” Severus suggested, drawing inspiration from the fact that their little snakes would be made out of socks as he looked up from his briefly. He had sewn the black eye on, and was in the process of positioning the white eye, carefully making sure they would end up even. 

“Yeah, or something magical like Merlin or Morgana…” Lily suggested, pausing in her stitching to look at him, her eyes shining with delight. The realisation that at least some of the characters from the legends she had loved as a child had genuinely been real people had thrilled her. The fact that Merlin had allegedly been a Slytherin added an extra element of pride to her belonging to the same House.

“Or Medusa,” Severus added, considering what few snake-related myths he knew of. It was sadly quite a small number, “And there’s also Morgause and Mordred too, though they all begin with the letter M. I wonder if that’s relevant…”

“Hmmm…” Lily mused thoughtfully, curious. He raised a good point, but she had no idea where they would investigate something like that further. The best source she could think of was the library at Hogwarts, which was sadly very far away. She returned her focus to her sock puppet’s left eye, still thoughtful.

“Magic begins with an M too,” she said after only one stitch, “So maybe there is something there.”

“But so does muggle and mudblood,” Severus pointed out, midway through casting off.

“True,” Lily accepted, “But! Witch and wizard both begin with Ws, which is just an upside-down M!”

“So we’re a bit… upside-down?” Severus concluded.

“Cause if we’re mudbloods,” Lily theorised, “We should spend more time upside-down to be better as a witch and wizard. Maybe.”

It was not the most sound of convictions, and so the conversation faded. Severus, his sock puppet finally having both its eyes, put it on his hand and looked at Lily. Slowly, he stretched his hand out. Lily was fully engrossed in her sewing, so didn’t notice that he was done with his eyes until the soft mouth of the puppet closed around her nose. She laughed in delight, nuzzling it back as if it was an actual creature, rather than an improved sock that had once belonged to Severus’s father. At least they had been washed. 

“You know,” she said, muttering slightly into his hand encased in its sock, “I’m glad we go to Hogwarts together… It’s so very Alice in Wonderland, you know. Sometimes even now I think it must be a dream, that I can’t possibly have gone to Hogwarts, that magic can’t possibly be real, that I’m just caught in some wonderful dream or maybe I’ve just gone mad or something, even though I’ve got my trunk with all my books and my wand in my room. But still it sometimes seems so unreal, now that we’re back in Cokeworth, but it was real because you were there too…”

Severus withdrew his hand, gazing thoughtfully into the odd, button eyes before him. He nibbled at his lip, glancing from the face he had sewn to the one he had known for years. He had always grown up knowing about magic, which possibly wasn’t strictly speaking in keeping with the Statute of Secrecy, but he doubted his mother cared much. He doubted a crummy street in Cokeworth would be the kind of place that the Ministry paid much attention to. He looked past his feet in their odd socks down to the slightly sluggish water that flowed beneath. They had both taken their shoes off, balancing them besides them. Severus didn’t want to risk his slightly too big boots falling off his feet if he swung them too hard, and Lily liked to be able to wriggle her toes freely. 

It did seem like an entirely different world to the one they had been living in. He felt a slight hint of jealousy at those who never had to leave the magical world, who never had to be brought back down to the dull mundanity of life in Cokeworth. A part of him wished that he and Lily could have stayed at Hogwarts all summer. He knew that she liked her parents and even Petunia, though he had decided to not voice his opinions on Petunia at least. Her parents seemed nice enough, but Petunia he could personally do without. She was always nasty to him, which he was in many ways used to, but she was also nasty to Lily, which hurt Lily and in turn angered Severus. He would have preferred to be at Hogwarts, without the other students and a long way from his father, just him and Lily with full access to all the magic of the library and the expansive grounds. 

“Suppose it does make Cokeworth seem like a total let down…” he said, resenting the rundown town they called home. For a moment, silence reigned. Lily shuffled, almost as if there was something else on her mind. Severus looked at her curiously. She had seemed to be on the verge of saying something for a while, but every time he thought she might speak it ended up being something entirely different.

“Sev…” she said, abruptly turning to him so that she could look him in the eye with the full intensity of her gaze. It was a very intense gaze and all of her movements spoke of deeply repressed excitement. Unfortunately as she did so, she knocked one of her sandals off the pipe they were sitting on and into the water beneath them.

Lily squeaked in startled surprise, shoved her sock puppet into Severus’s arms and jumped lightly down after her sandal. She landed with a splash. The pipe wasn’t very high above the water, so it wasn’t a long way down, and the stream wasn’t very deep. It only came up to her knees, though as her summer dress came down below her knees it meant that the hem got wet. The splash of her landing and the scrabbling after her sandal would have presumably meant that she got wet anyway.

Severus watched her. He carefully placed both of their sock puppets in his boots, a puppet per boot, checking that his boot were in no danger of falling. The sock puppets did use to be just socks, and socks were meant to go in boots so it seemed like a sensible place to store them safely. With a sigh, dripping slightly and chewing her lip, Lily looked up at him with a wry grin. She shrugged, holding her sodden sandal up victoriously. 

“You know that bit in Secret Water?” she started again as she clambered back up towards him, the frantic scramble through the water having removed any of her previous hesitation, “Where they all become blood brothers and sisters?”

“Yeah,” he answered slowly, a grin creeping over his face, as if he could guess what she wanted to say.

“I was thinking that maybe…” Lily muttered, trying not to smile too much.

“We should do it too…” Severus completed, excited about the idea. Lily beamed at him, squealing her delight and throwing her arms around him. This meant that she did also accidentally hit him with her wet sandal which was still in her hand, but he tolerated it. Her delight made up for that rather unpleasant sensation. For a brief moment, it seemed like they might both fall off the pipe much like Lily’s sandal had, but they recovered their balance. After a moment, Lily withdrew. She placed her wet sandal next to her dry one, and gave a feeble attempt at wringing out the hem of her dress. It didn’t make a huge amount of difference. She could tell already that her mum would be annoyed and that Petunia would make a comment about her being childish enough to play in the stream. She didn’t care.

“We’ve got needles,” Severus pointed out, gesturing to the sock puppets in his boots, which still had the needles they had been using attached to them.

“Yeah!” Lily agreed, “We should do it now. The weather’s good for it too.”

In some ways the weather shouldn’t have been a deciding factor, but realistically they were both aware that it would be harder to do if it was raining. Lily imagined that her parents would not be impressed with her idea, so she had no intention of telling them anything about it. She never got to go to Severus’s house, and she was quite alright with that. She still found his parents intimidating. It was not something she imagined they could really do in the public library. The librarian had already given them slightly dirty looks on a few occasions when they had turned up looking particularly bedraggled. So it had to be outs of doors, and for something so important it did make most sense to do it in a spot that they frequented often, such as their pipe.

“We’d have to swear to something, right?” Severus said, thoughtfully, taking the needles in his hands.

“Like, to love each other forever and ever,” Lily suggested, taking a needle from him and playing with it. She had been so caught up in the idea that she hadn’t thought about whether they should say an actual oath, thinking only of the act itself and all the meaning behind it.

“To be friends forever,” Severus added, “And maybe something about eternal loyalty or something?”

Lily nodded slowly. Determinedly, she looked at her thumb. Very carefully she pricked it with her needle, pushing hard to ensure that rich red blood welled up. Severus too was ignoring his inner voice that didn’t like the idea of stabbing himself with a needle and resolutely breaking the skin. Carefully they both wriggled slightly, realising at that moment that maybe the pipe over the stream wasn’t necessarily the ideal place to perform their little ceremony, as they had to be careful not to fall off into the water, something that was harder when moving with a hand that they couldn’t place on the pipe for extra leverage. But they managed to wriggle closer together so that they could press their bleeding thumbs together. Lily dropped her needle in the stream, but it was her mother’s who had plenty of needles so she barely paid any attention to that. She had used it for what she needed it for, and if she needed another needle she would just help herself to the collection in her mother’s sewing kit. It wasn’t the first needle she’d lost, and her mother had never figured out that Lily was the reason that she always seemed to have less needles than she remembered. Severus shoved his into a fold of his shirt, where he forget about it entirely and would later find it by accidentally scratching himself on it. 

They looked at each other, both suddenly feeling a little shy. They did usually sit close together without being bothered, but rarely was it ever face to face at such proximity. They also had never been bleeding into and over each other before. They shared a slight look, both clearly wondering if they were being childish but having gone too far to change their minds.

“I swear eternal loyalty, to always be your friend and to love you forever and ever,” Lily said with fierce determination, suddenly feeling intensely embarrassed by saying the words out loud, but refusing to not say anything. It sounded like something that a knight in a legend would say. 

“I swear eternal loyalty, to always be your friend and to love you forever and ever,” Severus repeated, equally determined to finish what they had started but feeling that maybe they should have given the entire thing more thought. The vow they had both uttered seemed somewhat childish, and maybe the entire idea had been, but the feelings behind it had been full of good intentions. He liked the idea of Lily, somehow, being family. She was easily the person he liked best in the world, after all.

Awkwardly, they released their grip holding their two wounds together, each carefully pressing on the pinpricks so the exchanged blood wouldn’t escape. There was a moment of silence, as they both tended to their bleeding thumbs, feeling silly and childish but also a strange sense of release. Lily wondered if now she wasn’t quite as muggleborn as she had been before, as Severus’s blood came partially from Eileen, who had been a pureblood witch. She dismissed that thought as ridiculous. Neither of them would ever be considered to be anything but mudbloods, and in a way it didn’t matter. Whatever their blood might be, they still had magic. Besides, she had a suspicion that science had other opinions on the way blood and inheritance worked, but she didn’t know anything further. Severus basked in the shy sensation of feeling loved. He hoped that the tiny prick on his thumb would scar, to remain as a constant reminder that he could always look at, a reminder that Lily at least loved him. A reminder of lazy summers when there were just the two of them, the rest of the world fading away. Something that would always make him not mind that his blood wasn’t pure, because now it wasn’t just his but Lily’s as well, and the good in her would always counter the bad that came from his father.


End file.
